... I dream of coffee machines crafted by crazy Dutch people!
For the longest time I have been obsessed with the coffee machines produced by Kees van der Westen. You'll see plenty of them in Australian cafés. The story as I understand it, is that Kees was an engineer for La Marzocco and branched off in the early 80s to produce his own machines which had their own distinctive style harking back to automobile designs from the 50s and 60s. I'm particularly enamoured with the one group Speedster.
However, a new dream machine has appeared on the horizon... the Spiritello! To me this is the lever machine perfected. I've written in this blog before about the beauty of the lever. The tension of the spring which drives a coffee machine lever is governed by Hooke's Law which tells us that the tension of the spring is directly proportional to the amount that it is stretched. When you use a lever coffee machine, you use the inherent leverage of the lever to extend the spring. When the coffee starts extracting, the spring is stretched to its greatest point and therefore the pressure applied to the coffee puck is highest. As the coffee extracts and the lever moves closer to its resting point, the spring displays less stretch and the pressure on the puck falls. The pressure is lowest at the end of the extraction process when most of the "goodness" coming out of the ground coffee has already been flushed out. Many believe that the lever pressure profile is ideal.
The Spiritello has a number of key features which elevate the machine above most other levers. The most important is the specification of the group itself. Kees builds this machine as a dual boiler saturated group. The lever group itself is encased in a body of water which is PID controlled to remain at the ideal extraction temperature. Heat exchanger lever machines change group temperature with every coffee extraction (the group temperature tends to rise as the temperature of the single boiler is higher than ideal extraction temperature). Other features include a locking mechanism for the lever which means that you're less likely to lose teeth in an unfortunate coffee making accident, as well as a steam wand built with materials which minimises the amount of milk residue on the wand when steaming.
I love this machine... unfortunately it's beyond my budget... but one can dream!
Next week I'm going to let you know about an amazing Colombian coffee processed with nitro maceration!