Saturday, April 15, 2006

Espresso machines


Here is Jason Grove's machine, it is a sweet single group Faema, very nice. I find espresso machine to be like bikes, they are beautiful works of art that serve a great functionality in our lives. The ones made by hand and with care, tend to be the ones I desire most, not the mass produced, plastic riddled pieces of %$@# that Starbucks and other chains try to pedal onto you, you might as well go out and buy a Trek, or Specialized...

I noticed that Jason is using Starbucks shot glasses in this photo, great looking shots! I did a barista training this past week in one of my dealers and noticed they too had a scoop from Starbucks, I guess we are all guilty. I have an old tamper from Starbucks, it is a paper weight on my desk now that I have a sweet Espresso parts machined tamper (espressoparts.com). I guess we all start with satrbucks, or someone gives us stuff from there because they think it is cool. It is like bikes, we all had a main stream bike somewhere down the line (Specialized, Santa Cruz, Trek...), those are the bikes you buy before you buy a real bike - I'm talking custom made steel, or ti.

My espresso machine is a Micro LaCimballi (pronounced: la ch-imballi), while living in Germany, I had an espresso out of one of these older piston, lever style machines - it changed my life. Since then, my pursuit has been to replicate that sweet nectar, and the golden rust brown crema, very few coffees and machines can produce. Even my wife Sandi is a a coffee snob because of this machine (not too mention the coffee).

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