this email just landed (21:40 UTC 26FEB2021):

Hi,

does this now have to be reviewed by Apple before they will let it into the App store?

if so im assuming several days?

Thanks,    

I have also asked for an explanation of the cause as the vast majority of users have been unaffected.  If this is provided i will let you know

Please note that you can continue to make espresso with your machine, you simply dont try to connect to the app (log out of the app and close the app).  You will lose the smart timer function and the ability to remotely change the preinfusion pressure, but you can change the preinfusion pressure direcly on the console of the machine if you remove the right side panel

Kind regards

reiss.

Blynk have responded very quickly and had a fix developed within an hour of the right person getting involved

Unfortunately in this instance the time zones worked against us as Blynk are in New York and I am in New Zealand, but here we are

Blynk have now asked me to enter the privacy and data control settings for the new version of the app, which i have just completed

My expectation is Blynk will then release the App to Apple for publication and then we wait - i have no idea whether that process is 'semi-instantanuous' or whether some days may pass whiist the wheels of the corporate juggernaut turn

As i understand it you will need to download a new version of the App from the App store; the current version will not work

I will post here again as soon as i know more

Thank you for your understanding

I am aware that about two dozen users of LR/R24 are unable to connect to the app presently

I am in the process of making contact with Blynk to discover what the issue is

I will post again here when i have something to say

I apologise to those users affected for the inconvenience

It might take a bit longer as this is the first time we have expereinced an outage

Kind regards

Reiss.

I have decided to provide advance warning of the forthcoming price increase which will be across the board on all items in our store

If you have any questions in relation to this please feel free to make contact

Kind regards

reiss.

we start the year by adding another good espresso grinder to sit beside the Kafatek Max II with Shuriken Sweet burrs, the Nautilus by Titus Grinding of Germany

i like to support independant operators that have invested a lot to help us create consistently excellent espresso; all of the operators in this space live and breathe their craft; it isnt a 9-5 job, they all wake up in the middle of the night wondering about a particualr issue, or suddenly realising the answer to a particular problem that they have been mulling over for months

please note that we paid the market rates for both of these grinders

while it is true that we are playing in the realm of diminishing returns with grinders at this level, that is only true if you are drinking dark roasts.  if you drink dark roasts dont waste your money on any of these grinders, get a Niche Zero and youll have everything you ever need.  dark roasts are so soft you can crush them between your forefinger and thumb.

however, these grinders are an absolute necessity if you want to make pleasing espresso with light roasts, the lighter the roast the more essential they are.  some light roasts are so hard they will stall all but the most powerful of these grinders; the Ceado E37Z for example will stall on light roasts unless the beans are fed into the grinder one by one, something i do not consider acceptable on any grinder, let alone one at this price point

one thing i can almost guarantee; the espresso produced from the same roast by these two grinders will be significantly different as they both solve the challenges of grinding in very different ways; both will have relative strengths and weaknesses and i look forward to exploring them

You can find it here; https://forum.londiniumespresso.com and log in as previously if you need to access the information in the Permanent file as a machine owner

In the not too distant future we will have a link to it in the Support page, which will be redesigned

reiss.

Effective 1 January 2021 we have updated our systems so we no longer charge VAT on a sales order that has a shipping address in the European Union

This week i hope that we can fully roll out our new chat service, new forum, make the old forum read only, and expand our knowledge base articles

We have a busy and exciting 2021 planned for you

Wishing you all the best

Reiss.

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.