Just reading around and stumble upon the decent espresso machine being built. Sounds like it ticks all the boxes. Anyone heard any more about it??
Lefteye
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Steam on a timer ? .... What if the milk is ready before or after the timer runs down ? And you would need a button for purging the wand before steaming and for cleaning .... And a button for using steam to warm a cup.
some things are easier with a mechanical switch/knob especially seeing that steaming is a 2 handed job and having a big knob or lever right by your wand is a lot easier and safer than trying to operate an iPad to turn the milk on and off whilst trying to hold the milk in the right position
with out meaning to be insulting, as I am truly interested in this venture, but do you use a manual machine yourself as some of the ideas seem to originate from a designers point of view rather than a users perspective ?
some things are easier with a mechanical switch/knob especially seeing that steaming is a 2 handed job and having a big knob or lever right by your wand is a lot easier and safer than trying to operate an iPad to turn the milk on and off whilst trying to hold the milk in the right position
with out meaning to be insulting, as I am truly interested in this venture, but do you use a manual machine yourself as some of the ideas seem to originate from a designers point of view rather than a users perspective ?
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To quickly answer your question: the screen presents large rectangular "buttons" that turn functions on/off, just as they do on traditional espresso machines.h1udd said:
I think there's a general worry about having to "operate an iPad" that I could do well to clear up. The tablet runs Android, is supplied ready-to-go and boots directly into the controlling application. You don't need to interact with the Android operating system.
I'm working on two ways of using this machine.
The "simple mode" presents 3 huge rectangles on screen that you tap to turn on or off. In this way, they operate exactly like on/off buttons on traditional espresso machine.
This is what this "simple mode" looks like:
those big rectangles measure something like 2" x 3", and should be easy to tap, even if you're busy steaming milk. My GS/3 has a 1cm button to turn steam off, which is considerably harder to hit.
You tap the icon to start a function, and tap it again to stop.
The optional "advanced mode" is getting rolled out progressively and the design is still being refined. Here is what the STEAM page looks like:
the idea is to (a) guide you to choose the amount of milk you want for the kind of drink you've selected (b) let you adjust steam pressure and © work with a bluetooth thermometer to automatically stop steaming when the milk reaches the desired temperature.
Each major function (espresso/steam/hot water) has a screen like this. You can choose to use this "Advanced mode" or stay with the "Simple mode" where the machine works more like a traditional machine.
No insult taken. <grin></grin>h1udd said:
At home I have a La Marzocco GS/3 and at the office we have a two group E61 "no-tech" machine. The coffee quality of my GS/3 is what we're aiming for, but with pressure profiling added, and more transparency as to what's going on during a shot.
As to the "steam timer" idea, it's just that at the moment, an idea. However, if you consistently heat 200ml of milk up, it's likely that running steam for the same amount of time each day (say, 35 seconds) will produce milk heated more or less the same temperature.
Since we have shot timers and volumetric dosing for espresso, why can't we have an optional steam wand timer? It seems like the same principle to me.
-john
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NOW PULLING SHOTS WITH THE NEW MACHINE
We finally put everything together today, and we're making shots. All components are "done" and we're now in "tuning", "lowering manufacturing cost", and "safety compliance". After that, we'll be making our final manufacturing choices.
Back in October, we built and demonstrated a prototype with all our ideas, but that machine cost us $2500 to build. In comparison, the machine that we built to make this espresso today cost us about $550 to make. We're getting close to hitting a manufacturing cost that will allow us to sell this machine directly to consumers at $999.
This is with Scott Rao's pressure profile of a slow ramp up to 8.4 bar for 10 seconds, then slow decrease to 4 bar until the end.
I wonder if we should move gently slope to 4 bar (it's pretty fast right now). Also, we're taking about 10 seconds to get to full pressure, is that perhaps too long?
19g in, 27g out, 30 seconds shot time, medium roast (Brazilian beans). Many thanks to @bloomsroastery http://www.blooms.com.hk/ for providing us with awesome beans.
93.5 celsius water temperature. Our maximum error over the shot was 1.5 celsius (under temperature), which we will be able to improve on over the next few weeks.
Is there anything you see in this video that you would comment on?
We finally put everything together today, and we're making shots. All components are "done" and we're now in "tuning", "lowering manufacturing cost", and "safety compliance". After that, we'll be making our final manufacturing choices.
Back in October, we built and demonstrated a prototype with all our ideas, but that machine cost us $2500 to build. In comparison, the machine that we built to make this espresso today cost us about $550 to make. We're getting close to hitting a manufacturing cost that will allow us to sell this machine directly to consumers at $999.
This is with Scott Rao's pressure profile of a slow ramp up to 8.4 bar for 10 seconds, then slow decrease to 4 bar until the end.
I wonder if we should move gently slope to 4 bar (it's pretty fast right now). Also, we're taking about 10 seconds to get to full pressure, is that perhaps too long?
19g in, 27g out, 30 seconds shot time, medium roast (Brazilian beans). Many thanks to @bloomsroastery http://www.blooms.com.hk/ for providing us with awesome beans.
93.5 celsius water temperature. Our maximum error over the shot was 1.5 celsius (under temperature), which we will be able to improve on over the next few weeks.
Is there anything you see in this video that you would comment on?
Hard to tell how it tastes from the video [emoji4] the mockups and the site look good - the option for analogue controls will inspire confidence.decent_espresso said:
So for function: how much control over pressure do you have ( how many zones, how is that control achieved etc)
Juice: What thermoblock or coils for brew & steam have you gone with for uk models?
I think the next couple of years will see more than a couple of similarly intentioned machines, if you can get a well constructed machine to market in the next 12 weeks, the world is your oyster!
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You draw a pressure profile with your finger. Inside the machine, there are 4 zones per second, if you want to think of it in terms of zones (which I know is how other espresso machine do).oursus said:
Control over the pressure is achieved by detecting the zero crossing of the AC current going into the pump and removing some of the pump cycles that way, thereby slowing down the pump.
We're using a coiled tube heater for brew, and another for steam, and both are custom made for us (and different). I can't tell you what heater specs we've decided for 220/240V as we haven't yet decided (that's the "tuning stage" we're in now). It'll likely be "as powerful as EC safety compliance lets us have".oursus said:
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I can't yet show you how the profile is set, as the tablet software is not yet done.Mrboots2u said:
I can show you the UI designer's mockup, with the huge caveat that the text is "total nonsense" inserted there by the UI designer as a placeholder for "real text".
You can see that we'll be charting the goal pressure profile (that's the line), the real pressure achieved, temperature achieved and water flow rate. All given in real time.
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A good bit of further information has come up on home barista, would @decent_espresso care to share it here too?
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DE1 and DE1PRO and La Marzocco GS/3.Lefteye said:
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I wrote an extensive response on Home-Barista.com (http://www.home-barista.com/espresso-machines/decent-espresso-promises-rock-solid-temperature-and-pressure-for-less-than-1000-t37395-380.html) to a set of really good questions, I'm guessing that's what you're referring to.
I'll repost that here, and I'm happy to take the conversation up here as well.
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"Do you have an expected release date for the V2 paddle and the Pro version; or will those be the same machine?"
The paddle feature is a projected future accessory, but I don't know when it will ship, as it is currently being worked on as a lower priority and it's not on our release calendar yet.
Currently, we're projecting an August 2016 ship date for two models, a DE1 ($999) and a DE1PRO ($3999).
The DE1 has:
* excellent temperature accuracy (worst case of +/- 1.0C)
* pressure profiling: choose one of 12 pre-set profiles
* charts that show you temperature, flow and pressure in real time, and also point out technique problems that caused a bad coffee
* a simple "tap the icon to make this" interface
* water temp settable between 80C and 99C
* precise control over the temperature of the hot water tap
* control over the steam temperature
* very high quality portafilter basket (equivalent to VST quality)
* 110V/220V
The DE1PRO adds:
- laboratory level temperature accuracy (no worse than +/- 0.3C, better still to be determined)
- calibration equipment (and steps) are provided so that you can regularly recalibrate your machine to achieve consistently accurate results
- make your own pressure profile
- temperature profiling
- flow profiling
- automatic detection of the end of pre-infusion
- flow vs pressure priority modes
- volumetric dosing
- water temp settable between 20C and 99C
- real time temperature, flow and pressure control, with on-screen sliders
- recording and playback of shots
- later: cloud storage, reviewing and export of all shots
- later: optional taste analysis storing (using the Counter Culture system)
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"Have you compared DE1 and your GS3 head to head in the cup?"
I do love my GS/3 and I'm friends with Bill Crossland, so I'll try to be as fair as I can be!
For a straight 9-bar shot, if my puck preparation technique is perfect on the GS/3, I find that both the DE1 and GS/3 taste almost identical.
I use a 5 second preinfusion setting on my GS/3, as I find that helps me avoid channeling and I get a more even extraction (I use a bottomless portafilter).
If my puck preparation is not perfect, the 9 bar on/off nature of the GS/3 tends to be merciless, and my less-than perfect technique results in a mediocre shot. I am by no means an Barista God, I've never worked in a café, and the number of shots I've made number in the thousands, not 10x or 100x that, which a professional barista would have done.
I find that the slower pressure ramp up of the DE1 (inspired by Nuova Simonelli's "Soft Infusion System") is more forgiving of imperfect technique, and so I'm drinking excellent shots more often with the DE1.
Both the GS3 and the DE1 have excellent baskets, similar portafilters, and accurate water temperature. I wouldn't expect them to be very different tasting.
The GS3 has amazing steam production, and it took me a while to decide on a steam temperature setting that I could control (about 20s to steam milk). Our DE1 in the lab is currently at about 50s to do the same quantity of milk, but we expect to get to 40s. I don't think we'll achieve the GS3's steam capability.
I have never been able to make the "tea" water-temperature-knob work right on my GS/3, and this has always frustrated me as I make a lot of Americanos. With the DE1's ability to set the "tea" water temperature acurately, my Americanos are the right temperature.
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"As you have improved technology are you seeing new dimensions to espresso or new challenges compared with the traditional machines?"
In Seattle, I was able to spend an afternoon with Dennis, the brain behindhttps://instagram.com/kafatek/ and we taste compared his Slayer and Synesso machines. They have very different taste profiles, and I was intrigued by Slayer's very long infusion technique. We were making shots with this same profile last week on the DE1, with a 2cc flow rate during preinfusion, lasting about 40 seconds, and the DE1 would go into a 8.4bar-to-4bar pressure profile when it automatically detected that the puck was fully saturated (I don't think Slayer can do this). The flavor we achieved here was more pour-over like, and definitely reminiscent of the Slayer. Dennis told me he prefers the Slayer for his light roasts.
With my GS/3, I play with brew temperature every time I change roasts. It's a bit slow to change temperature, but it does work. With the DE1, I like that I can change the brew temperature and immediately pull another shot to compare each side-by-side.
The same goes with pressure changes: I can pull two shots, one after another (there's no delay between shots with our espresso machine, but we did have delays in earlier incarnations), and then compare them.
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"Have you noticed with the DE1 that you can do things you could not do on other machines? For example, I believe your temperature and pressure profiling capability is likely changing your approach to beans and grind settings etc. If so can you share some of your observations?"
At this point, we don't have a real user interface to our espresso machine (I'm programming it), it's all driven by Ray's laptop, so we haven't been doing so much experimentation yet. Last week, we tried a Slayer profile, this week, we're onto Rao's profile and next week I want to try a bit of temperature profiling.
I hope that our flow profiling feature will yield interesting results, as it's my opinion that people using pressure profiling are actually trying to regulate flow, so why not simply set a flow profile and let the machine choose the pressure that achieves that?
This is the first post I've made describing the DE1PRO. We previously were holding back on these features because they seemed too "edgy" for a home audience, and more "coffee experimenter". My experience is that the DE1 will deliver shots at least equivalent in quality to the GS/3, whereas the DE1PRO is aimed at a much smaller, tinkerer market. The higher price lets us go "whole hog" and put everything we've developed into one model.
Incidentally, today Ray showed me his temperature profiling today, and I made a movie from our conversation:
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and possibly this is of interest too...Lefteye said:
"John, do you have local retailer/distributors in your supply chain or are you selling direct through the website?"
We are only selling direct. As many people predicted, the DE1 is a lot more expensive to make than the competition (about 3x more) and there is no margin in our business plan to give 40% commissions to middlemen."
Like the rest of the HBers, I too am very concerned about service and support, which is another reason I want to sell direct. If you have any problems, I want you to have a direct line with us, so we can fix the problem. My experience is that middlemen like to make margin from moving boxes, but usually get in the way when there's a problem.
Luckily, shipping things back to Hong Kong is almost free (USD$200 to fill a container from Los Angeles to HK), so our plan is if your machine breaks, you send it to our depot in your country, and we send you a new machine from HK. We'll eventually ship those broken machines slowly back to us, repair them and sell them at a discount as refurbished units.
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"How soon can we see pricing which includes delivery (and conversion for us outside of the US :| )?"
I've just signed a contract with our fulfilment house (that's a company that does shipping and customs clearance). As to shipping, you're looking at somewhere between USD$100 and USD$250 to ship our machine to you, depending on how fast you want it (15 to 20 days for the cheaper, 3-5 days for the expensive option).
For 220V/240V countries, the price is expected to be about 30% higher for the DE1, because we're putting heavier duty components into it. Some countries, like the EU, also have import duties that need to be accounted for.
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"Can you post the pressure profiles you will have on the stock DE1, or are you still finalizing them?"
We haven't decided on them at all, and I'm happy to discuss what we should have, on HB. I was thinking of having plenty of flat-pressure profiles, say at 4bar, 6bar, 8.2bar, 8.4bar, 9.0bar, 9.2bar, as well as profiles that imitate the stock profiles of Nuova Simonelli, Slayer and Synesso.
I run a private discussion group with 23 competition baristas, which includes two world champions, and I expect that some of our profiles will emerge from them.
We won't have it at shipping time, but my intention is for people with the DE1PRO to be able to make their own profiles, save and share them via our cloud service, and for people with the DE1 to then be able to download those profiles and use them. I wasn't foreseeing artificially limiting the number of profiles on the DE1 to some arbitrary number. At launch there'll be some set number, but as we push out software updates, this will number will increase until sharing is possible.
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"Several people have commented that you wont draw GS3/Slayer/Synesso crowds with your $1K machine. I and others made a point that quality and performance certainly might and should. This price point for the Pro model does not surprise me if one looks at the price of a Vesuvius, gs3, slayer etc."
My GS/3 cost me €7000, while a Slayer one group machine is USD$8500 (https://prima-coffee.com/equipment/slayer/single-group).
The DE1PRO is less than half the price of those machines, and except for our lower steam production than a traditional boiler machine, I believe it matches all their capabilities and has a half dozen other capabilities that they don't have. If you buy our 220V machine, I think we'll be close to matching their steam production too.
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"Many people on HB purchase commercial machines and I would even state that we are more likely to be tinkerers compared with a commercial setting where a barista would not have time to make multiple changes and play with different functions or change beans frequently enough to try out different profiles. I presumed your target audience was the home barista actually."
You're right, that's my background, and that is the target audience. However, nobody would win if we tried to sell the DE1PRO at $999 and subsequently went out of business. It's just too expensive a machine to build (and to have developed: R&D is not cheap) to sell at a BDB price.
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"As you continue to pile on the features I'm probably going to turn my concern to long term reliability/repairability. Until you came along the BDB was similarly positioned - an extremely capable machine at an unbelievable price. Since then many BDB's have died - but luckily for consumers Breville has gone above and beyond their warranty obligations and kept customers happy. I'm sure you're confident that these are going to hold up, but when suddenly thousands of machines are out in the wild getting used and abused who knows what's going to happen. I'm definitely optimistic, but $4000 is asking a lot of trust from a young company."
Of course we're going to do our best to make our machines hold up. The 3 of us engineers here are in our 40s, and have shipped a lot of new products, so we do have long term experience with this. I previously built and ran a company that grew to 50 employees, thousands of customers, and which ran the email newsletters for 3 US presidential election campaigns: this would have been unlikely to happen with bad customer service.
As a new company, I expect that no matter how great our machine, if it fails in the field and we don't deliver a good service experience, that we won't succeed as a company.
I answered, at the top of this message, how we're planning on supporting our machines. We'll also be selling all parts to anyone who wants to buy them, not just to technicians, in case you want to stockpile parts as a hedge against our longevity.
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"I wonder, will the $4k DE1 pro have multiple thermoblocks to allow for simultaneous brewing/steaming? If not, it's comparing apples to oranges."
Yes, both the DE1 and the DE1PRO have two water heaters, one for brew and one for steam. Both heaters are used for steam production, but the steam heater is a custom design to prevent "wet steam" from coming out the wand.
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"Agreed; I was just making a point about high end features and price point. The Vesuvius with pressure profiling would probably be the closest comparison. However, the difference in technology with the DE1 is inherently an apples to oranges comparison with any current machine. I would assume that the Pro model would need a sexy exterior and be capable of simultaneous brew/steam to be competitive at that price point; unless, of course the target audience really is just going to be research/lab."
Simultaneous Brew/Steam for us, is simply a matter of electrical juice available. At 220V/240V, we can absolutely do it, and we probably (not sure yet) can do it at 20A/110V. Not at 110V/15A, though.
Water heating once the shot is at full pressure takes much less electricity (because of the lower water flow), so we're also exploring the possibility of simultaneous brew/steam at about 10 seconds into the shot. That's nearly instantaneous, and might satisfy many people's needs for steaming milk while the shot finishes. This is still to be researched.
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@decent_espresso Can I ask, on the DE1, with the built in pressure profiles, and apparent ability to download other ones, why restrict the user from being able to make their own profiles? I think as a user I would be very fraustrated that it's essentially 'locked off' by the software. If you're allowing cloud downloading of profiles, and I had a mate with a PRO, I could just get him to make the profile and upload it so I could download and use it? Makes a bit of a mockery of it all?
There is still plenty extra to justify the price tag on the PRO.
There is still plenty extra to justify the price tag on the PRO.
@decent_espresso i'm the guy who suggested adding a spring-loaded lever style profile which by the way some people on here have done on their Vesuviuses so they should be able to pitch in. @Mrboots2u springs to mind..
As for the PRO I really think you should focus on making it more capable in terms of hardware rather than software features. I read about the physics modeling and that's pretty cool but you really need to make the $3,000 on top of the DE1 worth it if you want people to buy it. Alternatively you could narrow the price differential.. I'm pretty sure there will be very few people who are willing to spend 3x the amount of the DE1 on top to just get flow profiling, realtime flow/pressure/temp adjustments and higher pump pressure.
As for the PRO I really think you should focus on making it more capable in terms of hardware rather than software features. I read about the physics modeling and that's pretty cool but you really need to make the $3,000 on top of the DE1 worth it if you want people to buy it. Alternatively you could narrow the price differential.. I'm pretty sure there will be very few people who are willing to spend 3x the amount of the DE1 on top to just get flow profiling, realtime flow/pressure/temp adjustments and higher pump pressure.
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To my ears, the argument being put forward appears to be "you should give everyone the most advanced software you have developed, at no extra cost, in your $999 version, because it's just bits and bytes and has no manufacturing cost".risky said:
The DE1PRO software is much, more more extensive than the DE1 software. In the UI, there are pages not just for editing pressure, but flow profiling, creating temperature profiles, and more. In the firmware, there is about 3x more code written for the pro stuff than for the home.
At some point we have to decide what goes into the pro software and what goes into the home software. Generally speaking, for a $999 machine we're looking to make a machine competitive with the GS/3: easy to use, for people who just want to make La Marzocco grade espresso, at home, and so we don't complicate the use of that machine with things that would to appeal to tinkerers. It's an excellent coffee making machine, period. For tinkerers, we offer a more expensive, more capable, but also more complicated-to-use DE1PRO model.
I know there's reticence to pay for software, and that it's more "fair" to pay for hardware. But, if we've figured out how to do really neat things with software, that would otherwise have required hardware 10x more expensive, can we not meet half way, and recoup some of our investment while still offering a much-lower-priced-than-the-competition machine?
Should we not do innovation in software, and stick only to innovating in hardware, because people aren't willing to pay for software-based innovations?
I know that the $3999 price tag is high, but our nearest competitors (the GS/3 and the Slayer single group) are 2x as expensive, and offer much less (no temp/flow/pressure profiling).
My goal in making a PRO version at a $3999 price was to hugely lower the price of these features, which are currently only available in a very few, very expensive professional espresso machines.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that what should matter in people's decision is whether the features offered at a given price have that value to them, not whether they were implemented in software or hardware.
-john
@decent_espresso I actually didn't express myself very well. What I meant is do these $3,000 on top make for a better espresso in the cup or are they just cool features to play with? As you said it doesn't matter if they are software or hardware implemented if they do the same thing. With coffee equipment we are used to the hardware making all the difference so maybe that's why people are finding it hard to accept that the software can demand such a premium.
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I think the answer is "we don't know for sure yet", but let me go through each feature and say a bit about it.bronc said:
pressure profiling: the number of people doing temperature or flow profiling, with blind taste tests, is very few. Some world barista champions are very pro pressure profiling, so that technology seems to make a better cup.
temperature profiling: one of Scott Rao's books (I forget which, sorry!) has a table of suggested slight over-temperatures to compensate for the cooling effect of the grounds, based on the dose size. Scott is actually the codesigner of our espresso machine, and certainly our authority of everything that is serious coffee knowledge (Scott is wwwwwwaaaayyy beyond my knowledge). Scott has a theory, in discussion with me, that temperature profiling should lead to a better in cup result, because more of the extraction should take place closer to the water set point, by using temperature profiling to compensate for the cooling effect of the grounds. This "problem" with espresso is why Scott prefers pour over, where the entire extraction takes place closer to the water set point.
flow profiling: there are a handful of hand-modified machines out there using this technology, I don't know any machine shipping with it. In theory, it should do what pressure profiling aims to do, but to do it better, so I expect the in cup result to be better too.
automatic detection of the end of preinfusion: will result in a better cup than timed preinfusion, which is what other machines do. We're also managing Slayer-like slow preinfusion (2 ml/second, for ~40 seconds) with automatic detection of the end of that cycle leading into a pressure profile. That's giving us a really different espresso taste profile, more like drip coffee.
15 bar extractions: unknown, but Nespresso claims their machines extract at 15 bars, and according to James Hoffman they're getting very high extractions, so this is an interesting avenue to explore
Recording and playback of shots: if you have a really good shot, the DE1PRO can repeat the flow/pressure/temperature profile of it. That should lead to more consistently good shots.
We're also working on manufacturing our own bluetooth scale, and if we can get it ready in time, then these two features will be added to the DE1PRO. If the scale comes late, then people who purchased the DE1PRO will get our scale and software upgrade for free.
Gravimetric dosing: the Black Eagle famously touts this feature, as I'm pretty sure this will be part of the DE1PRO too. It depends on whether we can get our bluetooth scale launched at the same time as the DE1PRO.
Profile imitation: bluetooth scale allows copying of flow/pressure profiles of other espresso machines (such as lever machines)
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I don't know, the only article I've found analyzing Nespresso is this one: http://www.jimseven.com/2015/05/21/an-analysis-of-nespresso-part-i/MWJB said:
If you have some links of others analyzing what's going on inside a Nespresso machine, I would love to read those!
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