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From: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Subject: Re: Londinium Espresso

Date: 6 June 2011 01:51:45 GMT+01:00

To: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hi Reiss,

Bacchi arrived safe and sound a few days ago, and made my first few espresso's with it over the weekend.

All I can say is WOW...for a stove top it pulls almost as good a shot as my Faema E61:-)

I noticed a couple of small tubs of grease in the box, do i use this on the seals?

Thanks
Jason

lespresso <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.> wrote:

Hi Jason

How is your Bacchi?

Kind regards

Reiss Gunson

T. 020 8575 7894

M. 07801 224 520

LondiniumEspresso.com

... the Costa Rican Herbazu Estate is a close substitute. 

An expensive tamper won't improve your espresso, but they make the process a lot more enjoyable. Dose & grind are the variables to focus on. Tamping just keeps the coffee down out of the shower screen, seal, and the rim of the portafilter basket that faces up against the seal. When you have your grinder nicely dialled in & the espresso is good, try making a shot without tamping (still weighing the ground coffee once in the basket though). That's right, just shove the portafilter into the group with the coffee heaped up in a mound. Surprise! The espresso is just as good. We first twigged to this when we saw baristas in Spain not bothering to tamp and yet the espresso was perfectly acceptable.

So tamping is a bit of a ritual, which we are happy to go along with, but if you been told you have to tamp with 30 pounds of pressure, no more, no less, or your espresso will be doomed then you need to find a new source of guidance. It's hogwash. Beware of the cult of espresso by numbers, much espoused by the 'coffee experts' in these times! Start developing a feel for what you are doing and you will get on a lot better. No doubt there is someone somewhere refining a process document for the 'perfect espresso'. Run. A mile. 

Anyway, I digress. What was the thought process that lead to these tampers looking the way they do? We chose Reg Barber because of his reputation. We preferred to pay Reg Barber a premium rather than find ourselves involved in a discussion about what an acceptable finish on the wood was and what diameter radius was optimal on the face of the tamper to ensure it didn't bind or grab the portafilter basket, and so on. In short we thought it was best to go to someone who knew what they were doing.

Whilst we appreciate the clean, modern 'all aluminium' look that has been popularised by Apple Inc. and has subsequently been deployed on a vast array of consumer products, we have used enough tampers to know that wood is the only material to use on the handle. Whether in the depths of winter, or left in direct sunlight in the height of summer, wood is always comfortable to pick up. Try this with a black metal tamper handle sometime. The high density acrylic material that feels similar to whatever they make billiard balls out of isn't much better. Additionally, wood is very light, keeping the centre of balance very low in the tamper, which is important to help you tamp level. We have some tampers knocking around with the high density acrylic handle and a thin metal base. This results in a top heavy tamper that is really unpleasant to use. Not unusable, just unpleasant.

The shorter the tamp handle the less likely you are to tamp at an angle, simple physics. There isn't much that is important with tamping, other than the tamp being a snug fit for the basket in which it is being used, and tamping the coffee level. If the suface of the coffee puck is not level after you have tamped you will likely find more coffee comes out one spout than the other when you pull your shot. This ruled out all the tall skinny handles that seem to be in vogue at the moment. We considered the short ball handle, which is pretty good, but when we tried Reg's 'short handle' it just worked. It's odd, because to look at you might think it would be uncomfortable or difficult to hold. It isn't. When you pick it up it just feels right, and it is relatively difficult to hold 'out of plumb' which is what its all about if you want a level top on your puck when you have finished. It transpires that this handle is the original handle that Reg developed for his tampers. We think it's still the best.

A tamper that fits snuggly into the basket also prevents tamping at an angle, as does a deeper base on the tamper. This obviously costs as it means considerably more metal needs to be used in the base. That is what sets the best tampers apart from the rest.

Finally we wanted the tampers to carry the Londinium colours of black and gold. Choosing the base was easy, solid brass. Finding a wood as close to black as possible was more difficult. In the end we settled on wenge, solid, not a veneer. The Londinium Espresso logo has been engraved into the top of the handle to a very high standard, capturing far more of the detail in the fonts that we expected. The wenge handle has been sanded and finished to a very high standard.

Thanks to the team at Reg Barber for a wonderful set of tampers. We hope you enjoy using them as much as we do. They are sufficiently heavy that you just place the tamper on the coffee and 3 right-left twists of the wrist and the job is done.

Cut & paste from Skype chat:

Jonathan Goldsworthy 29/05/2011 22:09 

thanks again for the coffee, i am on to the yellow bourbon which is delicious. its really good some of the best that i have had of late for sure 

31/05/2011 22:02 

you were so right about tamping as well. i am getting a much better and more consistant coffee now by measuring the amount of coffee that goes in and hardly tamping at all

This arrived at 6am this morning, looking like nephrite jade, just as great green coffee should.  This consignment is better than the last one, with a much cleaner, less murky taste.  The closet milkies will love it too as it has obvious fruit notes, which the previous consignment did not.

When you have more than one Bacchi base it is easy.  Take the suspect base off the Bacchi.  Carefully present the machined face that the o-ring should be sealing down onto against the same machined face of a second base (also detached from the Bacchi it belongs to).  If the machines faces on both components are true they will not rock around when presented against each other; they will meet perfectly right around the circumference.

If your suspect base is warped it will not meet perfectly with the new base; you will be able to rock the parts slightly when you present the two machines faces together.

The distortion is very small; no where near enough to be seen by holding the face up to a light source and 'eye-balling' across it, but unless the two machined faces meet perfectly there will be enough distortion that the o-ring will be unable to seal sufficiently well around the entire circumference of the warped face to hold pressure.

For what we think is a reasonable GBP16.15 you can order a new base and your Bacchi will be as good as new again.

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.

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

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