I have long held the belief that your actual coffee machine plays the smallest % in the quality of the shot. I appreciate flow control, profiles, saturated group heads and all the other things in the long list but to me, these are differentiators only.
For me, the list in order would be
1) The Bean
2)Your grinder
3) Your routine/shot preparation
- Your machine
- The bells and whistles your machine has
If this is the case, then why do we ponder over which machine to buy, for in some case months? You cannot take horse meat and put it in the worlds most expensive oven, press a button and out comes a fillet steak. In this age in which we live, no matter how much we outlay on a machine, someone else will come along and buy the same thing but pay to have their name etched in to the custom powder coated diamond encrusted panels.