How cheaply can you put together a good setup
for espresso at home?
On a budget of, say, £250,
can I go from complete scratch
to something delicious at the end of it?
This was the question I set out to answer,
and in this project I learned a ton along the way,
the path did not run particularly smooth,
but let me hand you back to past me,
who will explain how I approached this whole thing
and what the game plan for doing this was.
So how is this gonna be possible,
I've said you can't do espresso for this budget,
but you can if you buy second hand,
and that's the gamble that we're gonna be taking today,
can I buy a second hand machine in good enough condition?
Can I repair it, restore it if necessary?
Can I get good coffee out of it?
Can I do the same with a grinder?
I don't know.
So the plan is this,
I'm gonna go onto eBay,
I'm gonna start bidding for second hand bits of equipment,
I'm gonna tell you in a second what my strategy's gonna be
about what kind of things I'm gonna buy,
a few other bits and pieces I'll probably just buy brand new
because they're easy enough to get,
but I'll be trying to hit that budget of £250,
which is a good amount of money,
but also not that much to go from nothing to great espresso,
let's start with the espresso machine.
Now with the limited budget,
shopping for secondhand means I'm only gonna shop
for one model from one manufacturer,
I'm gonna go and try and find a Gaggia Classic,
and there's a bunch of reasons I wanna do that,
firstly, loads of people
who don't really want espresso machines
often end up buying Gaggia Classics,
they're very available,
they're in department stores,
people buy them online,
loads of people have them
and are likely to then probably put them up on eBay,
so it's a very common machine,
secondly, it's relatively easy to modify in a couple of ways
that improve its output,
and third, there's loads of spare parts available,
it's a well-known machine,
it shouldn't be hard for me to fix something
if it needs fixing.
Now, on eBay it looks like if you search
for a Gaggia Classic,
my budget's gonna need to be
around 100 to £130,
your mileage may vary a little bit,
and obviously after this video goes up,
there might be a little bit of a surge in demand,
but if you're patient,
you can probably find a bargain,
but what about grinders?
Grinders are much more difficult,
finding a good cheap grinder is difficult to do,
I had a tactic of really chasing two different models here,
firstly, I was looking for some Sage or Breville grinders,
I think they make a very good espresso grinder
at the lower end of pricing for good espresso grinders,
I think it's about £200 for their espresso grinder,
they do a couple of models,
but either one do actually,
I think, a very good job,
chances are there's a few of those for sale
because, again, it's a very popular brand,
people tend to buy them and may be upgrading through those,
again, there's spare parts available,
all that kind of stuff.
The other grinder I've had my eye on
is one that's maybe not as common everywhere in the world,
but it's the Iberital MC2,
this is actually very cheap in the UK,
you can pick these up
for under £150 sometimes, brand new,
so super entry level in terms
of good espresso grinder kind of pricing,
so that's the plan,
I'm gonna buy these two things I hope,
get delivered here,
and the next time you see me,
I'm gonna be unboxing what I bought.
All right, first parcel is here,
this is the Gaggia Classic,
now, I got lucky here,
I paid £104 and 99 pence for this unit delivered,
which feels like a total bargain,
I was a bit worried actually going into this
that I would be constantly outbid,
and I was, they were going for like £150 quite often,
but patience paid off,
this is probably the 20th unit I bid on
and I got lucky or did I?
We'll soon find out.
Oh, portafilter.
Oh dear ,
now, that's not what you want the inside
of your portafilter to look like,
so there's gonna be some pretty heavy cleaning to come
in this particular episode.
Drip tray, very useful.
So there's good news and bad news,
we're missing a couple of bits,
they're not essential,
I could still make a coffee on this,
it'll be a bit messy,
but it could still be done,
we're missing the lid for the water tank up on top here,
which you really would want to keep dust out,
this is pretty dusty,
it's gonna need a good clean,
we're missing the little accessory
that goes on the side of this,
now I think they used to be called pannarello wands,
it's a sort of weird semi-auto milk foamer,
the steam isn't a priority for me here,
we're talking about espresso
and espresso first and foremost,
but if we can get a working steam wand,
that'd be good news,
and then the other piece that's missing
is a little tube that sort of discharges
from the solenoid valve,
one of the things that the Gaggia Classic has
that the others don't have
is this three-way solenoid valve,
it discharges any built-up pressure
from inside the portafilter out into the drain box,
if you don't have that,
you can get what's called portafilter sneeze,
where you take the portafilter out straight after brewing
and there's a release of pent-up pressure
that goes kind of ,
and it's quite unpleasant,
so one of the niceties of the Gaggia Classic
is that it has that three-way valve on there,
we just need the tube that runs
from the valve into the drain box.
Now, what we're gonna do to this
is have a little look, first,
in the group head here,
and then we'll have a little look inside too
and see what needs to be done,
we're gonna give it a simple descale,
we're just gonna use probably a 5% citric acid solution.
So the first thing,
we're just gonna take out the group head block here,
it's not a particularly difficult thing to do hopefully,
just to see if it's clean,
we're gonna look for signs of scale in this thing
or any other concerns.
So he's cleaned it,
that's good news,
gasket looks to be in reasonably good condition as well,
so I'm actually kind of hopeful on this front.
Let's get these top screws out.
All right, inside things aren't looking too bad, you know?
In here you can see the inside
of these things are actually very simple,
you can see all of your controls here,
you've got your boiler down here,
so one of the things that we can do
with the Gaggia that's quite desirable,
is that you can modify what's called the OPV
or the over-pressure valve,
now the way that loads of these machines work is
that they have a very loud pump inside them
that's a vibration pump,
that will produce up to, say,
15 bars of pressure,
what you could change is the spring inside here,
inside the OPV,
and different spring strengths will open
at different pressures,
bleeding off the excess,
allowing you to have your desired pressure
and you can buy a kit,
and I have bought a kit for, I think,
about £18,
that comes with several spring choices,
so you can brew at six or nine bars if you want to
with a relatively simple change to this part here,
which I'll do now.
So this is my OPV kit,
this is from Shades of Coffee,
they're in the UK,
there's a little installation manual
that comes with it that's online,
it's very simple,
essentially we're just gonna change
out a spring part inside here,
that's kind of it,
so there's a little tube we need to take off
it's gonna be a little bit resistant to it,
but it will give up in a second.
Hello, oh, now we've definitely got some scale in here,
which is interesting,
you can see that on here
there's a very fine coating of scale,
so a descale's gonna definitely be a good idea with this,
but this is our existing spring.
Now, in this particular kit,
this longer spring is the six and a half bar one,
and what we're gonna do is put it back inside.
So our descaler is in the tank,
5%, as I said,
that's fairly aggressive,
but I should need to descale just once and be done.
Good, I just tested this and the light doesn't work,
which made me freak out,
you can hear a clicking inside,
so, you know...
Now, I see hot water,
which is great news,
so it's gonna be difficult to temperature surf this
without having the lights work,
and I'll check the connections at the back here
and see if there's some loose wiring
or if it's the sort of buttons themselves that have died,
try and work that out.
So the path to cheap espresso does not run smoothly.
Now, you left me just starting to become frustrated
and not understand what was going on,
there's been a few issues,
but we've fixed them all, so that's good,
well, most of them, anyway,
firstly, we found a loose connector inside the machine,
it seemed like one of the connectors
had literally broken off somewhere,
thank you to people on Twitter and also aid
from Shades of Coffee for a little guidance,
that has now been fixed,
so the lighting on the brew button,
on the coffee button works,
so we know when we're at temperature,
which is good news,
power button still doesn't light up,
I'm not sure why,
but you can hear the thing come on,
it's still workable,
then we had a little bit of a leak on one of the hoses,
so that needed to be fixed,
that was a bit annoying,
and then while I was inside,
I discovered that while I had thought
that all Gaggia Classics have solenoid valves,
this one doesn't.
I don't know when the change happened,
I used to sell these from sort of 2003 to 2005,
and a solenoid valve was kind of standard,
this one, in the chassis,
you can see there's a hole,
that little hole is where the pipe would go,
so the hole is there for it,
there's a hole in the drip tray,
but I complained about there being no tube on delivery,
no, no, it turns out it doesn't need one,
which I suppose is good news,
it's one less part to buy,
keeps me on budget,
I think as far as we're gonna go here,
this espresso machine is ready to go,
let's move on to grinders.
Oh, more parcels,
let's come to these little ones in a bit.
It's that good traditional eBay packaging.
Hopper, never understood this color of hopper.
Hello, here we have it,
an Iberital MC2,
now, I will take the burrs out,
have a little look at those in a second,
it's a pretty simple grinder,
and what a lot of people like about this
it's got a small set of conical burrs inside,
that's no bad thing here,
certainly got the power to be grinding for espresso,
it's a step-less grind adjuster on this side,
which is good, oh, look,
this spins too, how exciting.
Let's talk about the other boxes that I got
which are kind of part of this whole setup.
I did need a set of scales,
I figured a set of scales had to go into this setup,
and so I spent £14.99 delivered,
for a digital set of coffee scales,
the coffee-ness is that they have a timer
as well as a scale function,
so a two-in-one,
so these should fit okay under a drip tray hopefully,
so £15 I think well spent on our budget.
I have decided to put in a basket into this setup,
now this I think is maybe a poor use of budget,
but I think a sound investment,
I think spending on a better basket,
I really like VST baskets,
but trying to be a bit more budget conscious,
I've gone for a Pullman basket here,
which I spent £20 on,
a VST'll be about £28,
so not a huge saving,
but, you know, I thought I'd give it a go,
this is a 17 to 19 gram basket
because I don't think we're gonna be pushing massive doses
around in this thing,
and 58 mil,
so another good reason for a Gaggia is
to have a 58 mil portafilter, so that's that.
This I'm a bit nervous about,
because this makes no sense,
I thought, "I need a tamper."
Of course we need a tamper,
we're not gonna use some plastic thing,
we're gonna buy a tamper,
And I went around on eBay and I found this,
and it was £5.95 delivered in the UK,
which I don't understand,
'cause that would cost at least £2 to ship,
so someone's made profit on this being £4,
now this looked like a proper tamper,
it feels heavy.
How is that five 95?
This feels like stainless steel,
it's weighty, it's heavy,
this is wood, £5.95.
It's a little loose in the basket,
not like a huge problem,
it's not a perfect fit,
it's not like a 58.3,
it's a standard 58 mil,
but we've got a tamper and we're on budget,
£6, you can't complain.
So I'll get rid of these,
put them to the side,
and I'll just have a little look inside of this thing
and see what the state of play is.
So hopper just seems to just come out, pretty loose,
it's not in perfect condition,
it's a bit cracked at the bottom,
that's not gonna stop it grinding coffee properly,
it needs a little bit of love, needs a wash.
Interesting, it's not in terrible nick inside,
it's a pretty simple thing,
you've got a kind of worm gear here on your grind adjuster,
which lets it be step-less,
so you can see you've got tons
and tons of control over your finer coarser situation,
and there's two reasons for wanting
to take this burr set out,
the first reason is I wanna wash the burr set,
give it a really good clean,
one, to remove any gross coffee oils,
and two, it'll give me a better idea
of how sharp it is,
when a burr set's very dirty,
you see this commercially,
they act almost as if they're a little bit blunter,
and giving them a good clean,
stripping off any oils that've built up on them,
can improve their sort of efficacy
and the kind of grind quality from them,
you've got a little plastic sweeper unit in here
and there's some grossness at the bottom of that
and having conquered the reverse threading
on the nut on the top of this,
it should be a relatively easy thing to get this clean.
Once this is cleaned up and put back together,
we'll do our sums
and see how I've done on the budget front,
have I, you know,
come in under budget, a little over budget,
and when we taste the coffee,
does it taste better than the money I spent?
That's the question to ask here,
before that, though,
there's an ad and because there's an ad,
I think we should do a coffee giveaway,
we used to do these quite often last year,
we should do one now,
I'll give away 15 bags of coffee,
the link is down below,
but now there's a quick ad
from this video's sponsor, Morning Brew.
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So here we are, we are at the end of this little journey
and we have our espresso machine ready to roll,
we have our grinder ready to go,
I did add one more accessory I didn't talk about before,
very necessary, I got a second hand Sage knock box,
you can probably get cheaper,
this was £13.70 delivered,
into the budget,
works perfectly fine in a domestic situation,
so that's there.
Now, I do also have the Sage grinder
that I bought over here,
now I bought this kind of by mistake,
it's a bit above budget,
I paid 135,
it's cheaper than it's full price of 230, I think,
but we won't be pulling shots with this right now,
we're gonna pull shots with this thing,
so the Iberital MC2, it's a timed grinder,
your grind control knob here, it's step-less,
which is a good thing,
and it certainly goes very fine,
I'm quite impressed by that,
you can adjust the time,
but it's a bit awkward,
there's a screw on the front here,
you have to put a flathead screwdriver in and twist it,
there's no real feedback, not great,
but I paid about £100 for this,
so I'm not really gonna complain,
now I have dialed in,
but I haven't tasted the shot yet,
so let's pull a shot,
now this grinder is messy,
I will say that for it,
it clumps quite a lot,
I didn't buy a distribution tool or a needle tool,
I would probably buy a paperclip
in this situation to de-clump this,
'cause it is pretty clumpy.
So yeah, as you can see,
some pretty big chunky clumps,
that isn't ideal,
I'm not gonna lie to you,
that's that's not ideal,
but it is a kind of fixable problem.
Now, the Gaggia does have a flaw
in that it's really hard
to get a scale underneath the drip tray,
we could just pull out the drain box,
and I'm okay with doing that
because I'm okay with making a mess,
you may not be,
and also know that if you do have a solenoid valve,
the portafilter and the group head will both drip
for a little while afterwards.
Ooh-ah.
Looks good.
Is this worth it?
Is it worth the time to hunt for it?
Is it worth gambling on the equipment?
Is it worth the effort?
Is it worth the stress?
Is it worth the money?
That's good espresso,
that is good espresso, like,
yes, it could be better,
yes it's, you know,
I could get the extraction up a little bit,
yes, I would like a little bit more temp control,
yes, yes, yes, but that's a good shot,
that's tasty, it's sweet, it's complex,
it's pretty well extracted,
the question is, is it worth it,
would I recommend going through this process?
If you are comfortable with the risk involved,
then I would say, yeah,
maybe go for it,
chances are secondhand equipment will have problems,
you might not have something as extreme
as having a leak inside the machine like we did,
or having a broken connector to fix,
and if you're not comfortable with that stuff,
then honestly stay away, save your money,
buy something where you're gonna get support,
a warranty, backup service,
all of those things,
they really matter when you're spending hundreds of pounds,
but if you are comfortable getting
inside an espresso machine,
if you're careful and you know what you're doing,
then, yeah, I would say go for it.
I would say, on the grinder front
that I paid about £100 for this,
and I'm reasonably impressed for the money,
like, I don't think I've seen a grinder this cheap
do espresso as well as this does,
I'm not saying it's a flawless grinder,
it definitely, you know,
has some issues with distribution,
it retains a lot of ground coffee inside of it,
it's not particularly intuitive to use,
but it is relatively capable when it comes
to grinding for espresso
and that impresses me for the money.
If I was between these two,
I probably would spend a bit more,
I'd probably break my budget to get something like this,
this isn't bad at filter coffee grinding,
it's a conical burr set as is this,
but it's a little bit smarter,
it can do a little bit more,
it's a little bit more intuitive,
it's a little easier to use,
I would probably pick this for the money,
£135, over this.
Now, before we wrap up we should say,
did I hit my budget?
Did I hit my £250 budget?
And if you're paying attention,
you would know that I did not hit my budget,
to do all of this,
I went £22 over budget,
which is about the price of the basket
that I put in the Gaggia,
but I would say, along with the springs mod,
the basket mod I would say is essential,
absolutely essential
to improving the quality of your espresso,
so I regret nothing from that perspective,
yeah, I could've just not bought a knock box
and just knocked it out
into my food waste or something like that,
that'd be pretty easy to do,
but having a knock box is a nice thing,
I don't regret spending over my budget,
but I spent £272-ish to get here,
and I can't think, honestly,
of a better way to spend £272
to get great espresso at home,
we're kind of nailing the fundamentals,
we're grinding fine enough into a good basket
that does good even extraction,
right temperature, right pressure.
Spending more money would give me more control,
more consistency and yeah,
a little bit of an improvement,
but primarily it's about the control and consistency.
Now, I don't get to keep these,
I'll be giving them away to my Patreon supporters,
they're the ones that give me a budget
and the support to make these videos to go
and just buy this stuff, experiment,
learn and have some fun along the way,
I hope you enjoyed this video,
and I hope you attempted to do a little research.
There's some links down below
to some of the things that I bought,
some eBay searches and that kind of stuff,
but now I want to hear from you down in the comments below,
what machine should I have looked at,
tried to buy on eBay?
What grinder did I overlook?
I'd love to hear your feedback down in the comments below,
have you bought second hand?
Did you have a good time?
Did you have a bad time?
Let me know, I wanna hear from you,
share your experience with all of us,
but for now,
I'll say thank you so much for watching,
I hope you have a great day.