Whilst an unfavourable review might not ever be welcome if it were accurate we could use it to improve the product, however showman Lance's stunt is factually incorrect on almost every point.  Lets walk through it

All spring lever espresso machines are sold on rated spring pressure.  To measure this you bleed the air from between the bottom of the piston and the top of the brew water.  Lance said he knew this and the highest pressure reading he could obtain was 5-6 bar

This is me in Auckland, New Zealand measuring the spring rating of a prototype vectis at 9.0 bar, as shown in the videos i have published previously using a calibrated industrial gauge.  For production we reduced the spring pressure to 8.5 bar as the machine was just starting to tip:

Lance says the Vectis is ready to pull shots in 15 minutes.  It is not.  The Vectis requires 20 minutes and a slow short flush for light roasts

Leave your SCA coffee extraction theory (developed for pump driven espresso machines) at the door when dealing with levers Lance and you will get on a lot better

Lance suggests that the industry orphan size, a 54mm group, should have been used.  Sure 54mm lives on as a legacy group, but it has no future

Inexperienced home baristas or those with a poor grinder prefer a basket that has a smaller ratio of diameter to depth because they are more forgiving of poor puck preparation than a 58mm group

A deeper puck of smaller diameter will give you a shot with more body, but reduces the separation of the flavours in speciality coffee

58mm gives you a vast array of accessories to play with as it is the commercial standard

Lance conveniently omits mentioning the biggest innovation ever introduced on a direct fill lever machine; the filling valve on the boiler.  If you have used a direct fill lever machine you will have received a steam burn when removing the boiler cap even if you waited for the boiler to depressurise as you still get steam wisping out of the boiler even if the boiler is not pressurised

To say the steam wand lacks power suggests Lance might have had an Alice in Wonderland moment as the opposite is true; the steam power of the Vectis significantly exceeds all other machines in its class

Failing to mention that it is the same fully serviceable commercial steam valve from the L2 and L3 is wilful blindness

DHL Express delivered Lance's Vectis to him on:

21. August 2023 12:28 Local time, Service Area: OPORTO - PORTUGAL

Lance had a lot of time to connect with the handful of unhappy Vectis customers that didnt come to me and ask for help because they too consider themselves experts, and he has broadcast their experience as being representative

There is no issue with any aspect of the Vectis and there are no plans to change a single dimension.  We failed to ultra sonically clean the boilers a second time after we moved the location of the top pipe for the sight glass, we have no problem admitting our failings Lance

From the very first Vectis we shipped it accomodates an 18g VST, something i think most of us would agree is the industry standard for modern espresso

The Vectis can be completely disassembled on your kitchen table, without a jig to restrain the spring.  This extreme ease of servicing is not something Lance wants to talk about

If you observe Lance pulling the shots in his video anyone who has used a spring lever espresso machine will instantly recognise that the Vectis is being misused.  We have customers who are extremely upset with us that the boilers had muck in them, but all of them think the espresso is exceptionally good.  That instantly makes your review an outlier Lance

Lance complains of a lack of body in the shot.  Body is a function of pre-infusion pressure in a lever espresso machine.  All dipper designs preinfuse at boiler pressure, which is considered low pressure so to add body you raise the lever part way up (after about 3 seconds of having the lever pulled right down to fill the brew chamber) until the piston is just exerting spring pressure on the brew water, i like about 3 bar.  the position that i like to use on the Vectis for this is when the top of the yoke is horizontal

When the first drip falls in the cup take your hand off the lever.  Adjust the flow rate of the cofffee by altering the grind size.  Target an average flow rate of 1g/s to get started (it will start off slow and accelerate as the shot progresses, hence an average, timed from the first drip falling in the cup/lever release), and you will have excellent espresso with exceptional flavour separation

You may not know this Lance, but I was the sole UK reseller for Olympia for about 5 years, and I have a number of customers that I sold a Cremina to that now have a Vectis.  They think the Vectis completely eclipses your beloved Cremina in every facet.  The Vectis has a pronounced sweetness in the cup, flavour separation, shot on shot consistency, and steam power that your Cremina can not match

The Vectis delivers the same exquisite taste in consecutive shots, whereas manual levers vary hugely from one shot to the next.  This is why there has never been a manual commercial lever espresso machine Lance; if you want consistency in the cup you need a spring lever

We may not have any social media presence worth mentioning, but we think you may have been rather badly advised for this stunt: people do recognise vandalism when they see it Lance

The only lesson we can take from your 'review' Lance is that if you build an expensive product that performs poorly no one says anything as market forces alone will cause it to wither on the vine, but if you build an exceptionally good product that redefines a market segment and is competitively priced look out

LONDINIUM Vectis.  Exceptional espresso without the hobby.  Powerful steam.  No turbos.  No tea.  Fully reparable on your kitchen bench.

pleased to announce that the stage one and stage two kits to upgrade your LR into an R24 are now available

note that the stage one kit can only be fitted without the stage two kit to an LR the uses the mechanical pressure switch (Mater or Ceme)  to regulate the pre-infusion pressure

if you fit the stage one kit only to an LR that has digital preinfusion the higher current draw of the 24VDC pump will burn out the control board you have

so for LR with digital pre-infusion the stage one AND stage two kits must be purchaed and fitted at the same time

Sometimes i read of people expressing a view that stainless is a vastly preferrable material for an espresso machine boiler, or even more oddly a group

Copper is hihgly malleable, ductile, and most importantly has unmatcheed electrical and thermal conductivity (unlike stainless which performs very poorly in this regard)

Additonally it does not suffer from metal fatigue from the repeated heating and cooling cycle that a boiler is subject to

Critically copper will not rust as stainless will if you end up with less than 12% chromium anywhere in the stainless as a result of fabrication, for example stamping the stainless where you create the mounting face for the heating element on the boiler (warranty claims arising from just this is i understand how the original Faema firm went out of business)

Stainless is thought by some to be more hygenic than copper, but that is not the case either

I saw this article on copper and thought you might find it interesting, so here it is; https://theconversation.com/amp/copper-is-great-at-killing-superbugs-so-why-dont-hospitals-use-it-73103

Copper is wonderful, but it has become expensive and for that reason we will not be using it on the boiler of the forthcoming Vectis model

& for the record copper does not have any lead in it, it is not an alloy, it is a pure metal that you can find on the periodic table at number 29

73 countries in all

Today, Thursday 2 June and Friday 3 June are public holidays in the UK but I am still available online to take your questions

Next week should be interesting when we receive the Vectis group back from the electroplaters, chromed, and from there we can assemble the group and see how it looks

The only two deliverables we are working on for 2022 is the Vectis and a new website that works properly on mobile devices as that is how most of your are accessing our website these days, a far cry from 2012 when we first laid the current website down

We might add a 58.55mm tamper for VST baskets and a couple of other tweaks, but that's it

There are no other changes planned

kind regards

reiss

as is the fashion this year we find ourselves passing on cost increases

cost push inflation is back with a bang after a long absence

i know there are a number of you with items orders on this part that stretch back to december

the best information i have is that they will arrive this week

these orders are my top priority for getting out the door

as soon as i book them out you will receive DHL confirmation emails in the normal way

kind regards

reiss.

UPDATE: 17FEB22 - 35 micron screens have arrived.  the back orders are being filled today.  when i wake up in the morning, friday in new zealand, i will be booking them out thursday evening UK time, to leave on friday uk time

Please note that what i have written below only relates to espresso

Having pursued single origin espresso for the last ten years in something of a search for excellence i have reached a conclusion, perhaps heretical to some, but never mind.  It is absolutely the case that there are some fabulous off the charts single origin/single estate/microlot espresso roasts in existence.  They are an absolute joy to experience, in many cases delivering flavours in the cup that you might not have thought coffee could deliver.  Almost always i order 1 kilo of any coffee so i get to taste it change from when it is just a few days post roast to when it is several weeks post roast, and tasting this progression is very helpful if you want to understand the roast and detect which flavour notes drop out as the coffee ages and which notes appear from the background that were not noticable when the coffee was at its freshest

However as much fun as it is discovering these single origin gems, and i will still be buying single origins that strike me as interesting, i have found that i have tired of their one dimensional aspect which is almost always present.  after ten years of single origin i am tired of a single off the wall flavour note that i never expected to taste in a coffee.  now i want those flavour notes but i want the full orchestra, i want balance.  i wanted perhaps two or three of these off the wall flavours carefully chosen by an expert coffee roaster to compliment each other in the way that heston blumenthal does with food.  what do i want?  i want a blend.  not a traditional coffee blend which is shorthand in the industry for penny pinching and trying to flog low grade coffee at a premium, the proverbial silk purse from a sow's ear, but a blend of single estate and microlot speciality coffees

The leads into my next thought.  in a good number of cities in the world there are now a good number of great coffee roasters; competition between them is high.  i think they need a new trick, a new product offering, and here is what i think that new product offering could be.  perhaps some are already doing it, i dont know

Speciality coffee has become obsessed with precision, at least by some practitioners.  Take grinders for example where users are weighing to a tenth of a gram and performing particle distribution analysis of the grind to determine the distribution of the size and shape of the grounds that the grinder is producing, and measuring grinder tolerances in microns.  But here's the thing; what about when you buy a bag of coffee that is a blend?  The beans separate by weight and the beans separate by size, just as any bag of an aggregate material will, but no attempt is made to address this.  It can be guaranteed that with a bag of blended coffee the proportion of each coffee that makes up the blend is going to vary with each 18g of beans that you scoop out of that bag, and its going to vary a lot.  Perhaps this doesnt trouble you at all, in which case click away and read no further, but i think this is letting the game down, particularly if you have purchased a blend of speciality coffees which if it is true to label you will have paid a lot of money for; you deserve a consistant taste experience with each shot you pull and to achieve that you need to lock in the proportion of each of the constituent beans in each dose you measure

The only way to lock in the proportion of each speciality coffee in the blend as the roaster wanted you to experience is if the roaster sold you the constituent speciality coffees in the blend before they mixed them

So, if their speciality blend contained say five different speciality coffees they would then sell the five coffee in the ratios that you need to make the blend.  So the blend might consist of 1 part coffee A, 2 parts coffee B, 5 parts coffee C, 3 parts coffee D, and 1 part coffee E.  The roaster could sell these coffees in 200g bags, so in the above example you would be buying 12 lots of 200g, a total of 2.4Kg, which some individuals might find too much but i think there are work arounds such as measuring out the coffee beans into individual bean cellers that many home barista enthusiasts already have and use and then freexing those that you think you wont be using for some time.  Then you have 2.4Kg of coffee that you have pre-blended at the exact ratios that your favourite master roaster envisaged you experiencing.  When you want a coffee you take the lid off the bean cellar and pour it into your single dosing grinder

Possibly roasters will baulk at that and just say we sell in 250g minimum and if the ratios of the blend dont divide cleanly into 250g portions, then tough, and i think the market would accept that as the beans left over could always be consumed as single origin or combined into new experimental blends, either way i dont see that it would go to waste

For sure this is a niche market and it wont be of interest to many, but i think in an increasingly competitive market for coffee roasters this is a point of difference they could offee that would not involved them buying any more coffee and not having to blend it would be one less step too.  The only downside might be having to offer the coffees that are only present in the blend in small proportions in smaller bags they perhaps they currently offer

On the customer side i would definitely be prepared for the extra work in blending the coffee myself in return for locking in the ratios of the blend so they were the same for every shot i pulled of the blend

If you are wondering if a blend you are considering purchasing is a speciality blend a good way to tell if whether the exact beans used in the blend have been disclosed on the bag.  If they have not you can safely assume it is not a genuine speciality coffee blend.  You would also expect that the beans in the blend are also available for sale by the roaster as single origin roasts, another good cross check

Personally i think carefully considered blends of speciality coffee are the future of specilaity espresso cofee because they give you the full orchestra taste experience, rather than one spectacular flavour note performing alone

UPDATE: 10 JUL 21

the little londinium is not going to follow a drip fed release to market approach, unlike most of our previous models

the 4 pre-production units will be assembled and tested, revised if necessary, and then signed off into production

the production components will then be produced and the machines will be assembled and the product will then be made available for purchase on our web store

one thing is cerain the news will break here first, rather than any social media platform

UPDATE: 3 JUL 21

the UK foundry have not delivered us the 4 sample lever groups for sign off into production, something we expected in May

we now have all the other components in house and there is nothing more for us to do other than wait

i am told by those experienced in dealing with foundries that it is a bit of a feature of the industry, but its frustrating none the less

there isnt much else to say as we have now taken all the project steps that are within our control as far as we can (boiler, portafilter, heating element, valves, seals, frame, power leads, packaging, etc, etc)

our suspicion is we may not receive the lever group until august 15

the only good news is when it does finally arrive we should be able to move quickly to assemble it

-------------------------

we remain on target to get a pre-production sample together this month, june

that isnt a guarantee that it will happen, but nothing has occurred yet which will prevent it from happening either

some people are taking some well earned holidays this week and on their return we will start putting pieces together

elements, seals, boiler, sheet metal fabrications are all very much in hand; the lynch pin in this project is the all new compact 58mm spring lever group which is a gem

rapid prototyping takes you so far, but it isnt until you screw all the real pieces together that you can see for sure how it performs

we're also looking to ship it with polystyrene free packaging as we feel we can do better in this area

kind regards

reiss.