• dfk41

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  • Post #1
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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…….?

https://www.suddencardiacarrestuk.org/2024/02/thank-goodness-for-madeira-cake/

    I too had a mignon paired with a single boiler

    I came from a gaggia classic that lasted a week

    Terrible machine esp for a learner, but seems to be highly recommended 🤯🤷

    It was replaced by a sage first cup was better than anything from the classic

    Hand grinding got old quick too,

    So moved up in the world

    Decent De1pro v1.45 - Niche Duo - Niche Zero - Decent is the best machine ever made -

      • TTal

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      • Post #5
      • Edited

      Sure thing, probably not as interesting as the rest, but this is mine. It didn’t start as a hobby. So I just assumed everyone made shit coffee :p

      Dehlonghi Scultera bought in 2014. Used with pre ground, Lavazza Rosso, in pressurised baskets….also dabbled with ESE pods..… coffee was ok. I liked it at the time, but didn’t know any better.

      I then decided a burr grinder would elevate my coffee so bought a Hario Skerton with ceramic burrs. Painfully slow and about 6 grind settings. Terrible thing. After a month of that I bought a £15 blade grinder and used that with supermarket beans. Extremely variable results (who would have thought!), so often went back to pre ground. The machine got used less and less.

      My journey then fast forwards to 2023, my brother bought himself an Aeropress from PACT coffee, so I did the same. It was a ridiculous deal which meant you got an Aeropress and a 250g bag of proper coffee (until I asked for it pre-ground anyway!) for under a tenner. Bought it and was blown away by the coffee, genuinely a world apart from the nonsense I’d been making with the Dehlonghi.

      This was the start…..

      The Dehlonghi got gifted and I found a Fracino Cherub about 2 hrs away from home, bought from a very friendly guy in Birmingham who had just upgraded to what my memory is telling me was likely an ECM Synkronika. It required a bit of work to repair a leaking steam tap which was easily done with a full front end service, plus a failed heating element gasket which turned into a new element once I’d managed to remove it.

      It was paired with a Eureka Mignon Facile. I found this a very steep learning curve, but very rewarding once I’d gotten my first drinkable proper espresso using fresh coffee… milk was tough, the Cherub steam power is crazy good, but the power isn’t easy for a beginner to handle.

      Most difficult part was understanding the temperature of the group, huge HX boiler, thermosyphon heated group etc, I got into a pattern to attempt to keep the group consistent between shots as best as I could. I made some fantastic coffee with it (to my taste buds).

      This was shortly followed by a Fellow Ode gen1 with SSP burrs for the Aeropress. Which I quickly followed up with a Gen2 just to see what the fuss was about. I then bought a Specialita to go alongside the Facile. So I could have 2 beans dialled in simultaneously for espresso.

      This actually worked really well. But I wanted to have multiple bags on the go to try and this didn’t really work with the eurekas, I did try single dosing the Facile, but the bellows just caused clogs in the declumper.

      This led me to a Niche Duo, which transformed my consistency and how easy it was to have multiple coffees on the go at any one time. I’ve recently got a set of filter burrs also and I prefer them to the Ode Gen2. But the faff puts me off regular swaps.

      Brewing wise I’ve expanded what I’ve got to dabble with, a standard plastic Hario v60, Harvey gifted me a Hario Switch which makes cracking coffee, plus a little Aroma Boy for the wife.

      Couple months back I saw an opportunity to upgrade to an ACS Vesuvius. Fracino went to my brother as an upgrade to the Dehlonghi!

      Extremely well made, exceptional coffee, more consistent, control over everything, brew temperature, brew pressure, boiler temperature etc. I “shouldn’t” need anything new for a while…..

      Cheers

      edited: typos from phone

        • TTal

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        • Post #7

        dfk41

        I genuinely could have carried on using the Fracino for many years to come, as I mainly drink med/dark. It does a superb job, when my family come to stay I’m usually making 5 coffees back to back. A mix of a black, a flat white and 3 cortados. The Fracino does it all without breaking a sweat.

        But I wanted to explore more types of coffee, the Vesuvius allows me to attempt lighter coffees and have control of variables that may make a difference. Will try some of Djangos current offerings again soon now I have the additional control.

          • TTal

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          • Post #8

          dfk41

          How many machines and grinders followed?……

              • TTal

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              • Post #10

              dfk41

              LOL, good effort, your wife must be a good un :P

                So, if you are sitting comfortably…

                For some inexplicable reason that I cannot remember, I stopped drinking both tea and coffee at the age of about 20. Many, many years later, I was on an SAS flight to Sweden and they were serving coffee and the aroma hit me and like a siren’s call, tempted me into trying a cup… and it was good.

                When I got back home I decided to start drinking coffee again, but unsurprisingly Douwe Egberts (which I thought was a posher version of Nescafe)could not get anywhere near the aroma and taste of that cup served on that flight. So, I started researching on the tinternet and came across the old ‘coffee forum that shall not be named’.

                It was there I learned a bit about the dark arts of ‘proper’ coffee. It seemed that as a coffee virgin without two halfpennys to rub together, a good starting point was a third or fourth hand Gaggia classic. Simple, fairly reliable and easy to fix if anything should go wrong with lots of spares and more importantly plenty of on-line advice.

                For weeks I scoured Ebay and came across an old Gaggia that even had been modded with a PID at a price I could afford.

                Next a grinder and a member, on the old ‘forum that shall not be named’, did referbs on grinders and had a Brasilia RR55OD and offered it to me at a price even Fagin would have been happy with. It was in immaculate condition with a new burr set. It was a monster and suffered with terrible static, but I replaced the plastic shoot cover with a thin copper one I made from a plant label and it worked a treat.

                The Gaggia needed more than a bit of TLC (hence the price) and so I set about stripping it down and totally dismantling it, replacing seals etc and even painting some anti-rust treatment on some areas inside that had started to deteriorate.

                That’s where my troubles started…. Putting it back together. Everything was fine until I tried to reconnect the PID wiring. Suffice to say I blew the chuffer up 3 times (sparks and smoke) and had to re-order parts before getting it to work again.

                But it did, and it made coffee that tasted 1000% better than anything that came out of a jar.

                But like everyone on this forum it didn’t/ couldn’t/ wouldn’t stop there. All the paraphernalia ( and snake oil) that goes with this obsession…Tampers, baskets, shower screens, WDT, portafilters, puck filters, bean storage, the correct type of water and most important of all, the plethora of different coffee beans abailable.

                Then came the itch that just had to be scratched… upgradeitis. I wanted something like my betters on this forum had. A dual boiler!

                Money has always been an issue, but although the amount I had managed to save was as thin as the hairs on my receding bonce, given a bit of luck I might just be able to take another step on the ladder to real coffee nirvana.

                Once again Ebay came to be my provider. A chap had been given a gift for Crimbo of a Sage Dual Boiler and separate grinder combo…. But he was not interested in it and so, he put it up for a ‘buy now’ price that would have had Scrooge turning in his grave, Fagin pulling out his beard in disgust and a scotsman crying into his porridge. A quick phone call to ‘she who must be obeyed’ for her approval (luckily she also loved the coffee from my Gaggia) and I hit that buy now button.

                It was also at this time a certain grinder was causing a bit of a stir… the Niche Zero. And I wanted one!

                But all my money had gone on buying the Sage combo. And there was my answer…The Sage grinder! Brand new, never so much as seen a bean pass through its burrs, got to be worth a few shekels. Plus, what about the Gaggia and the Brasilia? All three went on Ebay and were snapped up giving me enough to buy the Niche.

                So, that is where I am today. Okay, the Sage is not an all metal shiny chrome beauty and I know there is still some doubt of its longevity, but in the three plus years I have had it and used virtually every day, it has not missed a beat.

                If it lasts another three years without need of repair, for what it cost me, it will owe me nothing.

                Oh, and of course, not forgetting the different pour over equipment I have obtained too.

                I may still not be able to taste the nuances of different beans, but I put that down to having Neanderthal taste buds and not the coffee making equipment. But it is still a million times better than my freeze dried with added Coffee Mate days.

                I started my real coffee journey after moving to New Zealand for work. I’d always enjoyed a cafetière of coffee but was content to use pre-ground bagged stuff. I think I never made the leap to espresso whilst living in the UK as most of the readily-available espresso drinks from the big chains are pretty terrible.

                To say I had my eyes opened whilst living in Wellington is something of an understatement. I hopped on the espresso train just as soon as I saw a special on a Sage Dual Boiler and Smart Grinder Pro. I kept the Sage for a couple of years but upgraded the grinder to a Niche when they launched on indigogo. I couldn’t have been happier! Then I started to realise that the Sage, whilst very capable, was inconsistent in its profiling because it was being manually controlled by me, and I was lazy and somewhat bleary-eyed at 6am on getting up for work. I decided to try to automate the profiling side of things and was really interested in what John was doing over at Decent, and decided to buy a DE1 in 2021. It’s been one of the few things I’ve bought that seemed like a silly amount of money at the the time, that I have enjoyed using every day since. I swapped the Niche for a Philos recently only as my tastes have moved more towards light roasts.

                Decent DE1 • Mazzer Philos

                Good topic!

                I sort of got ‘into’ coffee in the late 90s when a place in my town called ‘Seattle Coffee Company’ (basically a Starbucks) opened. Previous to this the best coffee I’d had was that instant coffee that claims to be espresso…

                I bought a Gaggia Classic in 2005 and used pre-ground Lavazza and Illy. At the time I thought it was great. I then got gifted a grinder which I don’t remember but it probably didn’t grind for espresso and I didn’t know what I was doing. Still thought it was all great…

                Everything changed around late 2000s. Hipster living in London, living the Nathan Barley life working as a designer, everyone was talking about places like Nude and Square Mile appearing, coffee was the in-thing among my circle of friends/colleagues and I suppose that’s when I discovered coffee that wasn’t traditional Italian roasts and got really into pourover.

                At this point I had another Classic, and a Baratza grinder but was mainly making pourover.

                For me the ‘golden age’ was East London, just as the 2010s started and a few NZ roasters came over. There were SO many really great roasters and cafes opening it was almost harder not to be into coffee. Workshop, Ozone, AllPress, the original Shoreditch Grind, Climpsons, so many good places all within a couple of miles radius.

                In pretty much every cafe you’d see the same setup- LM Linea, Mazzer Super Jolly/Major. Maybe a Strada if the shop was extra fancy.

                The design agency I was working for had a 2-group Linea and two Mazzer Minis in the kitchen area for staff to use. Nobody really knew what they were doing…despite everyone thinking they’re Johnny Barista.

                At the time the Linea Mini wasn’t out (and I couldn’t afford one anyway) but I got a doser Mazzer Mini and a Silvia and thought it was the bees knees. In hindsight I was still making bad espresso, using the doser to fill the PF, not weighing anything, not knowing anything about extraction really but I loved it.

                Had that setup for years until I got a Bianca in about 2020 I think. I then bought a brand new Mazzer Mini with the larger burrs, then a Mahlkonig E65, then a used Super Jolly.

                Somewhere in between I got a Fellow Ode 2 which was a fantastic brew grinder.

                The Bianca was brilliant but I never touched the profiling and didn’t enjoy the (admittedly simple) maintenance on an E61. I didn’t want to upgrade to something I’d replace quickly so bought the Linea Mini from BB in 2022 I think.

                Obviously then got the Philos.

                I miss on-demand grinding so when the new Mini GBW comes out later this year I’ll probably get one and another Ode 2 for pourover.

                La Marzocco Linea Mini - Mazzer Philos

                Mine is very short and documented here :)

                Jan 2023:

                My equipment sits at:

                Moka Pot

                French Press

                Hand grinder (curr a C40 and Mazzer Omega)

                Real beans :)

                Stand-alone milk frother and handheld version.

                From there first and only machine is the LM Micra, quickly followed by the AllGrind grinder.

                Most recent has been the jump to the Super Jolly V Pro I think is fab,

                Lastly though has been tons of the accessories. Random baskets and tampers / cups / portafilters / holders / scales etc….. I should have a huge clear out as I seem to now be honing in on a couple of items and the rest may now just sit in a draw….

                • dfk41

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                • Post #15
                • Edited

                Tal Right, this list is not complete or in order. It is not a bragging list either. When I was working from home at my last house I had a man cave with access from the garage. My wife did not have a clue as to what I was getting up to. I sometimes bought gear new and kept it a couple of months, sold it on and just put the loss down to renting it. I often bought and sold and was pretty good at it!

                Londinium L1 Luxe

                Londinium L1 × 3

                Bosco Sorrento

                Bezerra Strega

                Profitec 700

                Sage DB x 4

                Elektra Nivola

                Orchestrale Nota x 2

                ACS Vesuvius

                La Marzocco GS3 Auto

                ACS Evo Leva

                plus many more I have forgotten about

                Grinders

                Mahlkonig K30

                Mahlkonig Vario X 2

                Eureka Mignon x 5

                Ceado E37

                Ceado E92S x 2

                Compak E8

                Compak E10

                Compak K8

                Compak K10 fresh

                Fiorenzato 3 × 64mm versions

                Fiorenzato F83 × 2

                HG One x 2

                Mazzer Royal

                Elektra Nino

                Eureka Mythos x 5

                Niche Zero x 3

                Niche Duo x 2

                Kafatek Monolith

                Sage thing x 2

                I have had many small vintage levers, like Arrarex Caravel, La Pavoni, La Peppina

                I have probably missed out loads of things but thats old age for you!

                https://www.suddencardiacarrestuk.org/2024/02/thank-goodness-for-madeira-cake/

                    • TTal

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                    • Post #16

                    Crikey!! Move over Lance

                    dfk41

                    I think that post is the biggest testament to the Mythos and Elizabeth!

                    La Marzocco Linea Mini - Mazzer Philos

                      That is some going David. What a line up

                      Very talented writers here. So I’ll attempt my story but bear with me since I’m not a native English speaker.

                      I remember my parents had 2 coffees, one at 5:30 AM before work and one at 3:30 PM after work for probably about 30 years. I was never interested in coffee besides maybe making what people would call Dalgona coffee.

                      Fast forward to 2016ish a specialty coffee shop opened close to my office and from time to time or on weekends I would treat myself to a latte and a croissant.

                      6 year went by with me drinking occasionally lattes, probably once or twice a month, until my son was born and family from USA came to visit. I knew they were big coffee drinkers so I found a Delonghi Dedica for free on Facebook marketplace. It was broken but with some YouTube turned I managed to open it up and fix it. I remember it had so much sand in the thermoblock completely blocking it. I fixed it and started reading and understanding the basics of espresso making.

                      But I had no grinder, no scale and the Illy preground coffee didn’t taste like the coffee shop lattes. Not sure how the family liked it either, their filtered one probably tasted better.

                      It was unimaginable to me to spend even £100 on a grinder, but along came an opportunity to buy a somewhat broken Lelit Anita (basically an Anna with a Fred in one case). It was ideal, a much better espresso machine and a grinder that I desperately needed to start getting consistent espresso.

                      I fixed that one as well, I started adding the basic accessories and I even learned Fusion 360 along the way to 3d print a dosing funnel to my specifications, since the 57mm grouphead wasn’t very popular.

                      Then I found a relatively good deal on an Eureka Specialita so I went for it. Less noisy, more consistent but the thought of having 2 grinders and occupied counter space made me look into an upgrade. So here I am today with a Lelit Victoria, which by the way led me to this forum, and happily looking into what mods I can add to it. But seriously I am not looking into an upgrade anytime soon, just some 58mm accessories which seem to be more expensive than the 57mm ones by the way.

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