Commercial espresso machine

Most of us would surely like a commercial espresso machine at home. And that’s for a number of reasons. When it comes to practicality though, the main reason is making 6 cups of coffee without spending 20 minutes doing this: the ability to pull shot after shot. Of course you have your routine finely tuned and maybe you know a few tricks to cope with entertaining five or six friends but in the end you are technologically limited by the espresso machine you have, be it a Silvia or the cheapest thing money could buy. Sorry for taking a long way round in coming to the point. I’m going to present a trick that you may want to try the next time you’re faced with a fine gathering of friends.

The main problem in that situation is the heatup time that your machine needs in between the shots and your aim is to minimize that as much as possible. You can reduce this time by landing a hand to your overwhelmed espresso machine, using a simple kettle to preheat the water that goes in your tank. Don’t overdo it! You don’t want boiling water to liquefy your rubber tubing. Instead think that every little extra helps. By fiddling around with various temperatures you will be able to get a feeling for the temperature of the water that should go in your tank.

Bottom line: you can reduce the time that your boiler takes to come to temperature in between shots by prewarming the water in your tank. That’s it, no heat exchanger, no thounsands of euros blown on a commercial machine.

Enjoy!

Week one

Hey everybody again! I found another few reasons to like it here: an order from amazon arrived in 5 days 😀 Back home this takes approximately 6 weeks. The weekend was really interesting: on Friday evening we went to this nice bar I was telling you about, quite reasonable prices: 4.5 Eur for a Mojito (you would have to pay 5 Eur if you were in Amsterdam for instance) and quite good food. Here most of the bars also serve food in order to keep their drinkers well…. able to drink ;). On Saturday we went to Eivissa mostly shopping and that’s a very tiering business. You have two kinds of stores: really cheap ones full of “Made in China”s like the 1 Euro stores back home and really expensive ones. That has taken up most of the day. On Sunday we went hiking somewhere on the island. The geography of Ibiza is quite generous: you have white sand beaches and blue water but also mountain like hills rocky and steep. And that is a good thing because it means there are also climbers. And there are. We found some climbing walls that were riddled with pitons.

On the other hand the shopping experience can be quite discouraging: don’t try to find your favorite espresso coffee (Illy in my case), because you might get frustrated. In fact don’t try to find any coffee that you ever heard of. The only things you find here is the Nescafe and an local brand called Ibiza coffee that I have not yet tried. It might be a revelation or the contrary…. My best guess is that somebody back at the Bourbon House cursed me not to find my favorite coffee wherever I go. That’s mostly because their coffee sales took a major blow because of my leaving.

That’s mostly it for now.

Cheers!