5 Months of White Horse Coffee, Part 6

May 10th, 2009

Machine upgrade time….

well much like spike being absent for the first period of our business, the three group  la marzocco linea we ordered custom built from italy was late for the first two months of trade, we were blessed that our two group, dubbed little annie was a pocket rocket and poured some of the best espro i have ever tasted…

we then installed our three group and it was in some ways having to take two steps backwards, to go forward, because the machine was unrestricted, and for the next two months unrestricted espro was the call, infusion times dropped from ten seconds to 3.5, hence a noticeable drop in body and sweetness was apparrent on the majority of our espro…. having said that josh aka j-bomb pulled me and nick tabet, owner of alley break cronulla, one of the most memorable shots i have ever had, and it was in a peak period rush, weird!

after an extended period we installed our restrictors, we had a 0.6mm restrictor drilled with a 0.66 mil bit, my experience with 0.6 mm restrictors hasnt been good, and i really loved the 0.7’s on little annie (our 2 group linea) and my time in japan was mostly on 0.7mm lineas and standard GB5’s which are 0.8’s standard… regardless right now id like to see how 0.6mm restrictors fare… “O” the frustration! Good thing is that the espro is tasting extremely good, maybe not as good as little anne but really sweet and awesome body.

next… the power of steam, after our trade picked up, we started to notice a fault in the old Lm construction, the blocking of steam valves with milk that gets sucked back up the pipe…. OUCH! I was so frustrated about this for some tme, my coffeegeek post can be seen here, http://coffeegeek.com/forums/worldregional/australasia/417114, at present with the aid of my old mentor his royal heighness of baristas paul bassett, we have successfully installed the espresso parts steam valve and it seems to be going great guns,  i guess we will know in a few months just how good they are…

so i guess the machine is all fixed now and that is a huge weight off our minds…

with our trade increasing we decided to give my old barista comp robur the flick and buy a 3 phase, we also now have a la marzocco swift for take away milk coffees.

here are the pics…