Kostverlorenvaart

A year ago I wrote a blog about Jip van Neerven , who was working on a modification of a Kees van der Westen Speedster espresso machine for his graduation project. Jip van Neerven and modified Speedster Today, having graduated, he presented the machine with his beautiful modification during the big exhibition of all graduated of his year. Detail of pressure chamber device Switches to open/close the pressure valves The magnificent Speedster is already a fairly silent machine in the standard version with a rotation pump, but now the pressure needed to extract coffee is generated by a simple bicycle pump and no motorized part is active at all, much like in a lever espresso machine. Pressure setting slider Jip van Neerven explaining his work The Jip-Speedster emulates a lever in more ways than just the pure "silent mode". It also mimics much of the beautiful pressure profile that makes many people love espresso from lever machines. The bicycle pump is...

[Also read  http://cafeticanela.com/2015/07/10/because-the-unplanned-things-are-the-best/ -- Marianela's report about her visit to Amsterdam] From Hungary, Laczkó Gábor emailed me last night to tell me there is a young coffee farmer currently in Amsterdam and he suggested we meet, so we did! On her way to a swimming competition in Alkmaar , Marianela Montero took a small detour to my house to taste some espresso from Burundi beans that I roasted a few weeks ago. Marianela Montero and Patrick Brouwer enjoying coffee Patrick Brouwer, a colleague who came to pick up some materials, also joined in. After her graduation from the National University of Costa Rica’s International Business and Trade School, Marianela has been traveling the world over the past year, exploring the coffee world abroad. This trip has taken her to Little Italy in San Diego where she worked at a roastery. She also had the opportunity to visit the recent SCAE event in Seattle, further expanding he...

Text: Jan van der Weel Pictures: Frans Goddijn James Hoffmann recently wrote a very interesting article about Nespresso. One of his findings was the extreme high extraction yield of Nespresso. Nespresso coffee extracts better on low end equipment than most high quality coffee in combination with high end brewing equipment. “This is pretty impressive work for 12 seconds of brewing. If you’ve played with things like the EK-43 then your target extraction range probably moves from 18-22% of the Gold Cup standards, up towards maybe 20-24%. If this is your window then a Nespresso capsule hits that window regardless of where you pull it, between about 25g of liquid and about 60g of liquid.” Nespresso cups opened up to test roast color on the Tonino device He wrote that there’s a lot speculation about the technology Nespresso uses. That inspired us to read into coffee patents that might explain this phenomenon. Reading these patents made very clear that the coffee indus...

Peter van der Weerd from www.kafko.nl tells me how he got an old broken fully automatic " egro " espresso machine. He took it apart , set aside the rotation pump for later use and built his own wall mounted espresso grinder using parts of " egro " grinder segments of the automatic. He made the wall mount himself, replaced the ball bearings, added a timer doser and a nice old "coffee" switch, added a hopper from another scrapped machine and now he has his own little handy espresso grinder to test the espresso machines which he repairs every day in his workshop:

Most La Pavoni home levers have the pressure relief valve but no anti-vac so at startup you need to release some steam to get up to the correct temperature and after turning it off the lever is sometimes "sucked" upwards by the under-pressure in the boiler. La Pavoni puts more modern valves on their new models. These have two-in-one: it's a pressure relief valve that opens when a maximum pressure is reached, to avoid breakage, it releases some steam during warm up and it allows air to get sucked back into the boiler when cooling down. A fine reason to go visit Peter van der Weerd in his www.kafko.nl workshop, and enjoy his company, chatting about things related to coffee machinery, life, family, pleasure... and coffee. Peter van der Weerd upgraded my old La Pavoni Pro with this new valve and in the process he did a check up of the machine, replacing a rubber seal in the boiler cap and also replacing the heating element which had suffered some overheating in th...