Monday, October 8, 2007

GeeBeeFive

Brand spanking new. Straight outta Italy. Finished less than a week ago.

Our La Marzocco GB/5 is here.



And man, did it feel good to unwrap it. I especially enjoy pulling off the film on the outside.

We had the good people at La Marzocco do a couple of special things on this machine: 0.6 mm flow restrictors (gigleurs) gives a much slower build up of pressure and when we tested this about a year and a half ago we felt it yielded much more body in the espresso. With a bottomless portafilter we noticed less channeling in general and the shots looked nicer.

However, we also noticed that we had to flush for quite a long time (4-6 sec.) to get the temperature stable. So on this machine we have also got the new hybrid / "Pierro" group caps. These eliminates the so-called banjo tube, where water had to pass on the outside of the group, thus achieving a much more stable temperature without the need to flush for as long.



Today we pulled the first shots off of the new machine, paired with a new Compak K-10 conical grinder and must admit it's awfully exciting to taste our blend like this. Lately a lot of people in the online community have seemed to be loosing faith in espresso, but stuff like this makes me feel very excited about the possibilities in this extraction method. Now we'll start dialing in the temp for our blend.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sweet. I had a single at Solde today and saw a couple of sexy bags from "The Collective". I´m really looking forward to pull some shots with your coffee.

Luca said...

You lucky so-and-so!

They put the linea hot water switch on it. The cool-looking hot water switch for the EE models was the worst thing about out FB80; the membrane on it ripped off after a few months and although we were sent a replacement, replacing it necessitated drilling a hole in the chassis to give us access to the screws holding the switch in place!

It's certainly a gorgeous looking machine and a pleasure to use. The EE brew buttons in particular are really cool. The only thing missing ... is lighting for your shots!

Congrats and I'm sure you'll have heaps of fun.

Luca

 
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