Merry Xmas!

ive just booked the last order out for 2020

DHL might charge a premium but when you hit a year like 2020 it pays off in spades; mail services have been an absolute joke this year

we have released our specialist IMS tamper with a diameter of 58.80mm and having tested it for more than a year i can tell you it is an absolute peach, even if you are upgrading from one of our earlier generation tampers you will notice that it offers a significant performance leap.  it is not suitable for VST baskets, or indeed the stock basket that is supplied with our portafilters by the group manufacturer

today i have fitted a thermistor to replace a Sirai pressue switch on my R24, but there is an extensive testing period to follow before you will see this released into the wild as an upgrade kit

i have to write a review for my second Kafatek Max grinder, this one with the experimental Shuriken 'sweet' burrs which are a massive upgrade on the 98mm SSP burrs that my first Max came fitted with

beyond the burrs the thread for adjusting the burrs seems to have much more travel in it to effect a given change to the grind size (a finer pitch perhaps?), and it moves much more smoothly with no grabbing

the guard to prevent beans being thrown out of the grinding chamber is a welcome addition and the retention seems to be much lower with the puffer dislodging hardly anything at all

furthermore, the static is vastly reduced

but the crowning glory is the vastly improved sweetness, from non existent before to EK43 challenging now

coupled with the built in power supply it is a strong contender for the title of best domestic grinder at any price i think

in 2021 we will be setting it against the Nautilus from Titus Grinding to assess the relative merits of each grinder

we ran out of time to fully integrate our CRM into our website, so while it has been almost fully configured the full functionality is not accessible from the front end of the website just yet, but it will be the first task for 2021

in Jan 2021 we also hope to showcase the Vectis, our entry level machine with an all new lever group that has been designed in England, and will also be forged in England

please note however that it will take around 16 weeks to get the machine tooling made, so dont expect it to be available for purchase until April/May

2020 has been our best year so far, but it has been a hard slog and greatly dimihished by Covid and other geo political uncertainties

whilst we dont see the uncertainties significantly diminishing in 2021, the investment we have made in 2020 should see us better placed to take them on

thank you for your custom, either this year or in an earlier year, have a well deserved xmas break, and we look forward to better meeting your espresso needs in 2021

reiss.

Finally we are migrating the forum to a new forum

This is something i have been looking forward to doing for a long time

We have been wrestling with trying to migrate the data from the old forum to the new and this has proved something of a challenge, but we believe we have a solution now and the migration is in progress

One of the key benefits of the new forum is making it easier for you to post images and video; i never found the old forum particularly intuitive in that regard

Once we have the forum cut over that then puts us in a postion to sort out our login mess which we have also been wrestling with for some time

We now have the solution in place, but we are unable to deploy it until we cut over to the new forum

Once we have the new forum in place it wont be too long until phase one of our customer relationship management (CRM) software is ready to plug in; this represents a massive change in how we deliver support to you and represents the start of me have to build a lot of detailed content so you have a how to PDF or video for almost anythign that can go worng with your machine

The CRM software needs to be in place before we can successfully bring the LC machine to market as our current systems would deliver a poor customer expereince if we tried to continue with them at scale

I apologise for how long it has taken us to deliver this latest round of upgrades to the website

Once we have these structural changes in place we will then embark on improving the appearance and navigation of the site

This process of upgrading the site will run almost the entire lenght of 2021 i expect as we have a huge amount of work to get the site to where i want it to eventually be

the forum is unlikely to be available until the middle of next week i expect

in the meantime we are still available via the other channels, of which there are too many, hence the need for the CRM to pull them all together onto a single dashboard

kind regards

reiss.

Getting the R24 into production was the completion of a massive piece of work that ran far longer than i envisaged, so there was a huge sense of achievement to finally get it out into the wild

I do not see any design changes with the R24, but rather our inhouse electronics board will continue to be enhanced over time until we get to the point where we can deliver software updates to the board through the cloud, and from there we willl look to provide full remote diagnosis of any issue with the R24 via the cloud; with our own in house board we are now in a postion to make this a reality, although it will take us some time to get to that point

The most pressing development now on the product side of things is obviously the LC (Compact), although it might get a new name as it is confusingly similar to the L1 Compressa

Where we have a lot of work to do is on the website

We are finally now working on the unification of the user login, so the login for the store and for the forum will be seamless, in the manner that it once was, which we lost as a result of redeveloping the website

As soon as that is achieved we have a new forum ready to roll out which is much simpler to post images and video clips

Once we have that in place i then want to completely re-cut the way we deliver our customer support

Currently it is delivered through the forum to an extent but we can vastly improve our service delivery in this area

My plan is to add some asset management software and to deliver the support by chassis number, so that if a machine changes hands we have a complete service history of the machine, as you do with say a motor vehicle; i think this would be valued by customers and it would certainly make my job a lot easier in being able to quickly see what work had been performed to a machine over its life, including any repairs, upgrades, changes of ownership, etc.  This area would be private and all support requests would be placed into this system; nothing would come in via email as this is just hopeless to manage over time

The relevant support fixes posted into the asset maangement area i would then cut and paste into the permanent file on a by machine model basis to create an area that is fully indexed and easy for owners to navigate, unlike the forum which is just a complete soup that you have to ladle to find the answer for your particular problem; we can vastly improve our service delivery in this respect

We will probably continue to run a forum, but it will no longer be the vehicle for the delivery of customer support, but more of a traditional forum for customers with a common interest in lever espresso to talk things over

The above changes are quite substantial and will therefore take us a while to deliver as we are a small organisation, but it is important to communicate that we are not satisfied with how we currently deliver our customer support and we have plans to comprehensively improve it

Enoy the holiday month of August if you are in the northern hemisphere!

reiss.

Apologies for taking so long to get this in place

We've got a raft of upgrades and fixes we are bringing to the website over the next couple of months

The next thing is probably a unified login between the webstore and the support forum; as most of you will have expereinced first hand, this has been something of an achilles heel for us since migrating this current website at the start of this year

I think we can roll out Google Pay too, and we want to improve the cosmetic features of the website and the general site navigation

We will also be pushing hard to get LR24 orders out this week for those customers that have placed orders

We've got a lot of of good things to get to you this year

reiss.

looking at some of the recent discussion on places like the home-barista forum it seems that i havent communicated the differences between our machines very well

i think the easiest way to understand our model range is to start with the LONDINIUM III

this is a 3 group commercial lever machine with no pump that relies on a connection to the water mains.  the groups are not mounted on the boiler, but rather an indirect link only between the two with two thermosiphon pipes (a feed pipe and a return pipe) to circulate water from one end of the heat exchanger, around the group with a water jacket behind the sleeve (in case anyone thinks saturated groups are a new idea), and back to the heat exchanger via the return pipe of the thermosiphon to be heated up again

the LONDINIUM II and LONDINIUM I are identical to the LONDINIUM III in design and purpose; they are simply shorter lengths of the same sausage, if you like

the LONDINIUM R(rotary pump)24(VDC) is the machine i set out to build from the outset, and this is why it has been the subject of continuous development

the objective was to deliver an espresso that tasted the same as that from the LI/II/III, but without the need to plumb in

the LR24 does not signify a shift in our espresso ideology; excellent espresso achieved with simplicity

our machines make you look like a proficient barista because you wont be fiddling with each variable; we have created a range of machines that are simple to obtain excellent espresso from, regardless of the roast level of your favourite coffee bean

so the change from the LR to the LR24 is best understood in this way:

a long time ago, perhaps as early as september 2017 we found the pump we wanted to use in the LR24; a peach of a pump that is both quiet and self priming.  that was the really easy bit.  the trouble was it was a 24VDC pump.  so immediately we needed to add a transformer to step down from mains voltage to 24V, and it needed to fit inside the limited amount of space in the machine.  then it becomes apparent that you dont use a transformer these days, but a power supply with a break out to allow mains voltage through to power the heating element.  it took a long time to find a power supply small enough.

then you look at the printed circuit board we had developed inhouse to control the pressure transducer in the LR and we are looking for space and so you think, well, why not extend the capabilites of our in-house board and incorporate the functions that have to date been controlled by the Gicar; this will allow us to save some space internally

i did not want the console for the pressure transducer to be visible on the exterior of the machine and so we developed the wireless connectivity.  some would have opted for bluetooth rather than WIFI, but i wanted to include a smart timer in the LR24 so you will no longer need an ugly smart timer plugged into the wall socket; it will all be on-board

once you have a 24V system you can do all sorts of things.  this should not be read that we have plans to complicate the operation of the machine (indeed the pump delay interval will be removed on the next version of the app), but we will have the low water alarm on the app, so if you are away from the machine you will be made aware that the machine has turned itself off becuase of a lack of water and you can fill it so it is hot and ready for service when you next need an espresso.  we can also do other things like dial down the speed of the pump and add a delay as the inlet solenoid closes so there is less water shunt as the solenoid valve closes; this doesnt improve the coffee, but it refines the ownership experience and once you have 24VDC you can control the pump in this manner with no degradation of reliability

the printed circuit board has been developed with circuitry for not only pressure, but also temperature and flow, so the possibilites for the future are wide if the need arises

in time we also want to move to being able to deliver software upgrades through the cloud, although this capability is not there yet

we fully appreciate that not everyone wants this kind of machine, and for that reason we have created the L1 Compressa, which does what the L1 does but in a much more compact format and accessible price for domestic users

in addition we are hard at work on the LONDINIUM Compact, a direct fill 58mm spring lever group, which i am very conscious is turning into something of a mythical beast as the delivery date has slipped and slipped as we struggled to obtain development resources, but COVID has given us a window of opportunity to crack on

hopefully the above narrative has added clarity rather than obscurity; the message to take away is that we have not abandoned our ideology of exceptional espresso from simplicity

managing one variable (pre-infusion pressure) allows us to control simultaneously brew temperature and also brew volume; 3 for the price of one.  this makes our machines easy to obtain exceptional espresso from.

I am enormously grateful for the tremondous amount of support we have received from customers over the last two months or so - we are tracking well ahead of last year and no one is more surprised about that than me

I am acutely aware that orders have been despatched more slowly that usual and it has just generally been more of a challenge to fulfill orders and keep things rolling

we have stocked out of the IMS35micron shower screen, but we have ordered more from IMS and we can probably expect to see them back in stock in about 6 weeks

against this backdrop i am very much looking forward to the return of Sue, our parts fulfilment person as the last few weeks a factory of 97 has only had 3 staff on site for the fulfillment of critical orders - the factory manager has not only been building and testing an packing the machines, but also spares and dealing with warranty issues, so it has been more effort in yet output has been down

i am aware that a couple of you have been waiting on your LR for too long, and there are also a number of parts and kit orders that have been open for too long

i am confident that this is the week we will get fully up to date again

if you have any questions you are always welcome to call or email me; if i am awake i will answer

kind regards

reiss.

it seems like we've got this bedded in now and working well.  if you have any issues please do not hesitate to contact us

we are now working on unifying the store login and the forum login

presently when you purchase a machine you are not automatically assigned owner rights within the forum, which gives you access to the PDF user manuals, so please contact me if you find yourself with a new machine and unable to acess the owner's manual

we hope to have this functionality up and running again in the near future - we had it previously and lost it in the most recent redesign

we also have upgrades to deploy for the forum (to simplify the use of attachments) and also to the checkout so we can offer new payment methods like Apple Pay, which once you have used it is really hard to go back to plugging in your details each time - just double click the right button on your iphone and the transaction is complete

we are also taking steps to improve the performance of the forum when you save a post - the response time is currently too long on the larger threads

there is also a lot of work to be done in simplying our mobile site and enhancing our desktop site

you never get to the end of the rainbow with web development; there are always things to refine

After several months of development we are pleased to announce the addition of SMS mobile telephone number verification to our web store

We have added this functionality for your peace of mind that an order you place with us will arrive

We have had two instances where customers entered either the incorrect telephone number, or failed to update an old telephone number

As a result the DHL notifications went to a third party and this created an opportunity for the third party to redirect the goods, in one case in good faith and DHL were able to receover the goods and deliver them to our cusotmer; in the other instance they were gone

There may be some teething issues with it; please get in touch if it is giving you grief

reiss.