Precision digital manometer for Olympia espresso machines arriving any day

We have had the engineers at Olympia Express in Switzerland build us a custom digital manometer with a fitting that allows us to screw it directly to the top of the boiler.  If you have an Olympia espresso machine of any vintage and would be interested to have it calibrated to see how accurate the gauge on your machine is, then please get in touch.  We will also us this instrument to calibrate all the new Olympia machines we sell to UK customers.

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 May

Reg Barber Londinium tampers have been shipped

We hope to receive these in about 8 days or so.

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 May

Leaky Bacchi? No worries!

When lubing the Bacchi and changing the o-ring in the base doesn't address the problem, then the cast aluminium base plate has been distorted ever so lightly (you wont be able to detect simply by eye-balling the top surface) as a result of being subject to excess heat.

The honest ones amongst you make the job easy by ringing us up & telling us that the telephone rang or the children flooded the bath or martians landed in the garden, and as a result the Bacchi was left on the heat for an extended period of time.

In this situation it's easy as we will send you out a new base and you simply undo the two 5mm hex screws that hold the base onto the frame, screw on the new base that we send you, and your Bacchi is as good as new again.

The Bacchi is an espresso machine that is one of the few genuinely environmentally friendly products sold today as any component that fails can be quickly and easily replaced at a reasonable cost.

Now you could grumble that the base should be made of cast iron, or another metal or alloy that would be more resistant to warping when subject to thermal stress, and we have suggested this to Andrea Bacchi.  But life is never that simple.  A cast iron base would add considerably to the weight of the product and push up the freight cost considerably for international sales.  Cast iron also breaks quite readily if you drop it.  Copper could no doubt be used, perhaps layered over stainless steel, as is commonly done on the base of saucepans, and not doubt other alloys too.

For a number of reasons (cost, weight, aesthetics) the Bacchi has a cast aluminium base that may warp if you subject it to extreme heat/leave the product on the heat for an extended time period well beyond the sub-10 minute period that it has been designed for.

You can criticise the product for this if you wish, or you can use it as intended and it will never be a problem.  If you buy your Bacchi from Londinium Espresso you can be assured of first class after sales service and support on any of the products we sell.  Wherever you are on the planet, we'll go out of our way to get your Bacchi as good as new, even when you have done something really stupid.

You will remember that prior to selling the Bacchi we tried and tested a whole range of portable espresso devices.  To the best of our knowledge the Bacchi continues to be the only machine on the market that makes real, dense, 22-25 second, 2 x 60ml, espresso.

If you heat the daylights out of it we can ship you a replacement base at a very reasonable price.  If you drop it on a concrete floor and bits break, again, replacement parts are available for every single part.  If the shipping costs come up as excessive please get in touch as it is a limitation of the way our website works having to record the gross weight of each item rather than the net weight, which results in the shipping weight being considerably over-stated when you order multiple products of relatively low weight

The Bacchi makes real espresso, far superior to any machine up to at least GBP1,000.00.  If you doubt the veracity of this claim, drop by and try our demonstration Bacchi that has been faithfully serving exquisite espresso for years now.  Bacchi espresso machines are unbelievably simple to use and maintain, and consider taking one with you on holiday this summer; they are brilliant if you like to enjoy an espresso in the wild.

Bacchi: nothing comes close for real espresso under GBP1,000.00

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 May

Reg Barber Londinium tampers are getting closer

Reg Barber of Canada is building us some very nice espresso tampers.  We like the modern appearance of satin finished aluminium tamper handles, but for our money a metal or high density synthetic tamper handle is unpleasantly cold when you've just tumbled out of bed at 6am in winter to make your wake-up espresso shot.

For us there is only one material to use for a tamper handle; solid wood.  Even on the coldest morning it doesn't suck all the heat from your palm, but almost instantly feels comfortable.

We have opted for wenge, being the 'blackest' wood that we could find, and the Reg Barber 'short' handle profile as this is Reg's original design, and as with so many things we think it is still the best.  The base is solid brass.  After much deliberation we changed our minds from our initial request for a 'c-flat' base profile to just plain old 'flat'.  The Londinium Espresso logo has been engraved into the top of the handle.

We are really pleased with finished product, and have ordered them in diameters of 50mm (Cremina), 54mm (Maximatic), and 58mm (Bosco) to ensure the owners of these machines can obtain a tamper of equal performance that is an absolute joy to use for literally decades to come.

P.S.  the crochet work is Reg's, not ours, and is not included.  The sharp eyed among you will have noticed that only the top of the handle has been finished on this prototype.

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 May

UK deliveries

As Royal Mail seems to be committed to pricing itself off the market, without making any attempt to introduce process efficiencies by investing in technology or improving the customer experience in general, we are pleased to announce that Interlink will be taking over the critical role of helping us get your order to you with the least inconvenience to your busy schedule.

Let's face it, goods not arriving when you expect them to can become an enormous headache, to the extent that it puts some people off shopping online, or causes them to take their custom to another online coffee roaster.

For small orders you will see that we have left the Royal Mail rates in our shipping rate table, but we expect to see the vast majority of customers opt to pay a little more in order to receive their order faster.

What sets Interlink apart from other couriers is they allow you to elect a 1 hour time slot within which your goods will be delivered.  If you provide us with a mobile telephone number when you place your order you will also be able to receive text messages to keep you informed of your order's progress.

With Interlink's help we look forward to providing you with a vastly improved customer experience in your dealings with Londinium.

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 May

What's unique about a Londinium coffee subscription?

Typically a coffee subscription is a prepaid product for a defined period of time, often 6 or 12 months, whereby you are asked to pay the full amount in advance.

Having parted with your cash, if for any reason you are less than satisfied with the coffee or service you are receiving you're going to have to live with it for the next twelve months.

Secondly, you become an unsecured creditor if the firm were to collapse before you received all of the coffee you paid for.  In other words you will only get your money back after all the secured creditors have been paid, and you will typically be paid on a pro-rata basis.  So, by way of example, if there is GBP10 left after all the secured creditors have been paid and GBP100 is owed to unsecured creditors, you will receive 10% of unexpired value of the subscription.  Into the bargain you will wait many months to get your money back.

With a Londinium coffee subscription you only pay a month at a time, and you can cancel at any time with no notice period for any reason you like.  Yes, that's right it works on trust.  The thing is since 2007 we've only ever had one customer exploit the arrangement, and he tired of the game before we did.

So with a Londinium monthly coffee subscription you get to keep your cash in your pocket for much longer, and your maximum exposure in the event of financial collapse would be the cost of 1 month's subscription.

Give it some thought.

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 May

Continuous improvement

Well-meaning initiatives like this dreamt up as 'products' by top management consultancies like McKinsey have a very short half-life and quickly degenerate into mere 'buzzwords' in the corporate lexicon to be derided, although not when anyone is listening.

Notwithstanding, the underlying concept remains valid long after the ridicule and cynicism sets in.

Continuous improvement, albeit not as continuous as it should be at times such is the nature of a small family business, is something that is central to the manner in which Londinium Espresso seeks to develop.  Not in a formal, monthly reporting drivel kind of way, but as simple principle that we keep in the back of our minds as we decide which coffees to offer.

We constantly look to reduce the number of coffees on offer as we are familiar with the research that demonstrates that providing your customers with too much choice actually reduces the number of sales as you bamboozle your customers with too many decisions to make in order to get to a sale.  Yet on the other hand we are conscious that we need to offer enough choice to satisfy the varied needs of the connoisseur.

Such are the daily perils faced by a coffee roaster!  Looking back to our inception in 2004 when we first started to learn the dark arts of roasting coffee we seem to have come a long way.  Since late in Q1 2008 when we opened our doors as a commercial enterprise we can also see the progress we have made.  That said, one of the most attractive things about coffee to us is the opportunity it offers to keep discovering new tastes, and to build up a library of tastes that we can refer to and draw upon in the future as we are approached to create a coffee with a specific taste.

We hope you have enjoyed your journey with us this far, and we look forward to bringing you new and interesting coffees each month.

As always, if you are not satisfied with the results you are achieving with our coffee for whatever reason, please get in touch.  One way or another we will resolve the issue to your satisfaction, wherever you are in the world.

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 May

Fresh Bacchi espresso machine stock has arrived

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 May

Machinery: automotive & espresso

Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, famously said 'if you want to go faster, just add lightness'.

Add to this the slightly more pessimistic observation that has become known as 'Murphy's Law', 'if anything can go wrong, it will', and often embellished with 'and at the worst possible time'.

What does all this have to do with espresso machines we hear you ask?

Well, when you are a niche global business as we are there is one thing we prize above all else; machines that provide exceptional results straight out of the box, and keep doing so for years and years.  In the unlikely of malfunction they need to be products that can be fixed easily 'over the phone'.

We supply spare parts anywhere in the globe at very short notice with the use of express couriers, and the design of the products is such that anyone who can be trusted with a screwdriver can fit them, without recourse to a specialist espresso machine engineer or special tools that the manufacturer only provides to factory trained personnel.

Location of Londinium customers (online sales) by geographic location:

We have proved time and again what a harsh environment espresso machines present; water, heat, steam, electricity.  This kind of combination virtually guarantees that any weak points in the design of an espresso machine will be found out sooner or later.  As the 'playstation generation' we tend to place undue weighting on how 'eye-catching' the electronics are.

Unfortunately the allure of the electronics, PIDs and all, won't over come basic shortcomings in the thermo-dynamic design of a machine.  For this reason we favour the Bosco lever espresso machines, workhorses that remain largely undiscovered outside Italy.  

Londinium is proud to bring Bosco to the world as it is a product that we can rely upon to embellish our reputation with the exceptional espresso it delivers with minimal training, and is what we like to colloquially refer to as a 'bomb-proof' machine when referring to its reliability.

Bosco espresso machines are currently making exceptional espresso in Afghanistan as I write this, such is their reputation for the quality of the espresso they can reliably provide in one of the less hospitable regions of the world.

We are trying to obtain some images of this machine in operation for publication on this blog.

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 Apr

The number of days since roast date: the neglected variable in espresso preparation

As a coffee aficionado you will already know the importance of bean selection, correctly roasted, correct water composition, correct water temperature, correct grind, correct dose of ground coffee, correct pre-infusion, correct extraction time, correct cups, correct temperature of the cups, and so on.

As the market seems determined to use so called high quality coffee beans intended for preparation by the filter method for espresso use, which invariably produces an espresso with very bright acidity that can't be roasted out without turning the bean to soot, we have spent a lot of time evaluating the significant impact that time plays on the taste of a roast.  As a roast ages the brightness of the acidity fades, and the more subtle notes in the background have a chance to present themselves to your taste buds.

A good example is the Costa Rican coffee we are currently offering from the Zamorana Estate, and also the offering from the Herbazu Estate.  In our view both are awful when opened at 8 days old, and while still too bright at 10 and 12 days old the improvement for every 2 additional days of roast time is not merely theoretical or academic, but significant.  We would recommend a minimum rest period of 14 days for the Zamorana Estate, and personally we try to wait 18 days if we have a bag lying around here.

It's beyond our powers to 'tell' you when the coffee is at its best, mostly due to differences in personal taste, but also differences in espresso equipment and technique have a significant bearing on what tastes best, and at what age.  We are of course responsible for providing suggestions & guidelines to assist you in getting the best from the coffee.

If you fall in that group of people who are purchasing coffee from somewhere that is supposedly only a few days old, yet you can't obtain a deep rich crema (when you can from other coffee), then we would respectfully suggest that the integrity of the roast date may have been compromised and its time to find another coffee roaster.  For espresso use coffee needs time to rest, for the acidity to ease back, and the complexity of the roast to present itself.  The brighter the coffees that have been used (which typically runs hand in hand with coffees that are regarded as 'high quality') the longer the rest period needs to be.

If you want to improve the results you are obtaining from gourmet coffee when prepared as an espresso we suggest you start paying more attention to the forgotten variable; the number of days since the coffee was roasted.  If the bag has not been opened you will have no trouble obtaining a deep rich crema from beans that are three weeks old.

Over the next while we will slowly add what we think is the optimum rest period to every bag of coffee we roast, but in the meantime it is safe to use 10 days as a 'rule of thumb' if no rest period is explicitly stated on the bag.

• Reiss Gunson
• 2011 Apr