Death of an Espresso Machine

Once again life gets in the way of a follow up posting. Last week I promised to follow up with some tasting notes on pre packed coffee. As it would turn out our espresso machine decided to pack it in. Today I was roasting some more coffee beans, trying out new blends such as Nicaraguan (90%) & Robusta (10%), and comparing it to straight Nicaraguan. My wife and I have been giving the home espresso machine a good hammering this week but alas, today all I got was steam pouring out of the brew head when I went to turn it on.

Being the technician that I like to think I am, I set out to pull this thing apart to see if I could find the problem. It took me about an hour to get the cover of as the screws were cleverly hidden behind matching rubber seals. Once I removed the cover, I found nothing wrong with the internal workings. All the silicon tubes and wiring was in good nick so that was an hour wasted.

The problem must be in the boiler. Once again it took me at least another hour to remove the boiler. Most of the time I was trying to find the right screw driver! After removing the screw that covers the boiler chamber I finally found the problem. The silicon seal covering the boiler chamber had perished.

It dawned on me then that I had just wasted several hours in pulling the machine apart. Access to the boiler chamber was just a matter of removing the brew head cover and then the screw cover from underneath the boiler…Doh! After putting the machine back together, another hour wasted, I discovered to my horror that I’ve put the brew head cover back on at the wrong angle… double doh! Now I’ll have to wait until I can get a replacement part and then I have to pull it apart all over again. In the meantime it looks like its back to the old stove-top for my espressos.

‘The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes, are those who do no thinking.’ T H Huxley, Aphorisms and Reflections, 136.

Branded Coffee

A few days ago a customer asked whether I could help her to find a coffee she liked. From her bag she produced a foreign valve pack with no English information. She knew we wouldn’t stock the brand itself but she wanted to know if we had anything like it.

I have a trained nose so I asked if I could have a smell to see if I could perhaps find a close match with our Arabica beans. One sniff and I knew the problem I was faced with: the coffee was a blend of Arabica & Robusta beans. The blend smelt closer to some freshly brewed instant coffee than to any of the fresh ground Arabica beans we had.

When I told her we had nothing to match, she wasn’t convinced and was a bit disappointed. I opened up a few of the coffee tins so she could have a smell of the beans inside. After trying a few she agreed that we had nothing close to what she wanted.

The next day one of our regular customers came in and told us she was glad to be back. When we asked why, she told us her story. Her son had come home to visit and he had just been to Italy. He had mentioned to her that he liked a certain brand of coffee while he was over there (I won’t name the brand) so she went out and purchased a pack.

When she made the coffee using her espresso maker, her son and she agreed that it was the worst coffee this side of instant that they had ever had. She said she couldn’t wait to get home to her usual blend of Arabica coffee beans so she could make herself a real cup of coffee. Before she left I asked her if the coffee from the pack tasted more like a gravy mix than coffee. ‘Yes! That’s exactly what it tasted like,’ she replied. I informed her that was because the coffee she purchased contained some Robusta beans (I have since found out it in fact contains 20% Robusta).

Robusta beans have a very different taste to Arabica. They tend to be strong both in caffeine and taste. The taste is not considered by most experts to be totally desirable as they lack the complexity of the flavour of Arabica beans. Robusta beans have a commercial use in blends where its full body can give lighter coffees a greater kick. Robusta is commonly used in instant coffee where the processes used help to reduce its more prominent flavour.

Aside from instant coffees, I have yet to try Robusta coffee beans on their own. Although it has been some time since I have tasted instant coffee, I recall not being particularly fond of the flavours. I’m a little scared to go back and try it as fresh coffee but for the sake of this blog I think I will need to go back to the stuff, for science.