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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Isn't it high time that one of the UK coffee brokers organised a UK coffee roasters' championship?

Our latest 'optimal' settings for the Bosco are;

Boiler pressure: 1.25 bar (indicated)

Dose: 16g

Pre-infusion: 3 seconds

If the machine has been idle the first shots out will be too cold.  You will need to run 2 shots to get up to temp, and these should be discarded.  The third shot will be very good; the fourth shot will be exceptional, every time.  Then the machine will hold equilibrium as the time it takes for you to cycle a shot will prevent it from getting hotter & hotter as the group acts as a heat sink.  This is the machine that makes you a maestro.  This isn't a hit and miss machine.  It makes exceptional espresso accessible to anyone, especially when paired with the precise dose control that an electronic doser-less grinder offers.

Longer pre-infusion times, such as the 8 seconds we use for the Cremina, kill the crema dead.  With 3 seconds pre-infusion the crema is so deep & dense it's all embarrassingly easy to deliver best in class espresso.

If you are a barista pack a bag of your favourite roast that you have thousands of shots experience with and make an obligation free appointment to come and run it through the Bosco.  We don't do pressure selling; we just think you owe it to yourself to see just how much better your espresso is off these so called 'low tech' machines.  Yes they are low tech.  The trouble is they make the best espresso.  As an added bonus they run like clockwork and are extremely easy to fix on the very rare occasion when they may need attention.

Don't believe the high-tech hype.  To paraphrase the old '70s t-shirt slogan; 'Boscos do it better'.

Carlo probably doesn't need any help from us as I think he is one of the best in the world at what he does.

If you are having a dull day and appreciate photography check this guy's portfolio out.

I defy you to say it doesn't inspire you to get outside and enjoy the elements; sun, wind, or rain.  Wishing you every success Carlo.