When I first became interested in coffee, it was around 2003. We went on a family holiday to Torquay for a couple of weeks and I hired a VW Sharan for the journey. With only me driving, I made frequent stops at motorway services and sent the kids in to get me a couple of takeaway coffees. I had no idea what they got me and when eventually I asked I leant that the shops all had BTC machines. As an ex Birds Mellow drinker the stuff they brought to me tasted pretty good.

On returning home, I went to the entrance of the rabbit hole! I somehow found my way to a website reconditioning Gaggia Classics in Leeds so bought one. It came with a plastic tamper and I thought I was so hip. I bought tins of red Illy pre ground

and really thought that life could get no better! The organisation I worked for had a couple of hundred staff and allowed you to send emails to ‘everyone’. So I started to ask others about coffee and received pretty low brow responses! But one of the IT guys in my own office reached out and recommended I buy a burr grinder from Starbucks for £45 I think…..so I did!

That in turn meant that I had to ditch the Illy pre ground and find beans. The earliest memory I have was going on to Ebay and buying a bean called Bella Roma in gold coloured 1kg bags. The roaster was somewhere in Cardiff and they were ok. I bunged the whole open bag into a chest freezer and just took it out as I wanted. The next purchase was a tamper. I stayed with the Classic for a year or so before becoming more knowledgeable when I joined the first version of this forum in about 2006 or so.

That led to me buying a Fracino Heavenly off Ebay for a couple of hundred quid. At this point there was no real knowledge out there. I did not know what an HX was. No idea about water, descaling, group seals or anything like that. I was as happy as a pig in muck in my ignorance! I did meet Adrian Maxwell at Fracino who told me I had to ditch the Starbucks grinder and he just happened to have a real bargain! They had used it at a Trade show a couple of years earlier. It was an on demand as well! I paid £130 or somewhere close to that and for my money, this turned up

Of course, mine was the original version and was both enormous and sounded like an airplane taking off! Ignorance won the day though and I told myself that I could not be happier! That happiness was soon shattered though when Steve Leighton at Hasbean told me about an exciting new grinder he was soon to stock and as I was a pal could have the test unit months ahead of the official release. I remember @DavecUK telling me not to touch it with a barge pole, but I was undeterred and bought it! I felt a $million as home equipment was still not plentiful….I had a Mahlkonig! Imagine my delight a few months later though when grinding and both of the adjustment slides started to move up and down involuntarily! Steve did not want to know and put me on to the importer who I contacted and arranged to send it back to. Imagine my surprise a few days later when they told me there was absolutely nothing wrong with it and they were sending it back to me. I rang them and asked if they had not found the cd I had made of the levers moving up and down! I received a brand new unit days later.

Meanwhile on the advice of @DavecUK again, I bought a Eureka Mignon in red and so started the relationship I had for many years with BellaBarista. The Heavenly was sold and Claudette offered me an Expobar Leva which was a dual boiler test unit at a very good price…….by now I was so far down the rabbit hole I needed a torch……have I ever found my way out…….?