Kostverlorenvaart

Vince Fedele of VSTlabs sent me a big new VST 25g capacity filter basket that almost fit my LONDINIUM portafilter and Tije de Jong made the rim along the bottom of the portafilter a little thinner and wider so now it fits perfectly. Tije remarked that mostly such portafilters wobble a bit in the lathe as they are never perfectly round and centered but this one sat perfectly still in the lathe claws and he cut out a neat and even ring of brass. Before: top portafilter with 18g VST bastet. After: bottom portafilter with 25g VST basket With 25g VST basket Portafilter with bottom made thinner and wider Two neat rings or metal (brass and chrome) cut out Close up (i.e. camera held nearer the object)

Tije de Jong added an optional set of cup warmers on his La Pavoni cooling fins, a temperature probe inserted in the ring and a temperature display: Probe (center) inserted into cooling ring against brew group, cup warmer attached Temperature monitor, and two cup warmers (one in use)

There's another new FZ94 owner in the growing landscape of FZ9 machines on the world. Welcome Michael Wong! Michael bought the complete FZ94 & Avirnaki set at the recent SCAA2017 event in Seattle and brought it back with him to Vancouver. Michael writes: Since the last time I wrote to you, I have followed the instructions from your blog postings about Marko's program.  Now my FZ-94 is linked up with Artisan so I can try out the features like profile graph plotting, Artisan controlled drum speed, fan speed, and drum temp (SV).   Your posts and Marko's programming works are beyond-words magnificent! There are so many things in this set up (FZ-94 + Artisan) I need to understand and learn! I will write again to hope get some instructions in implementing the next stage, according to your blog post, "hands off" automated roasting. Some pictures Michael sent: Michael's Instagram also has a number of FZ94 entries already: htt...

Using the "alarms" functionality of Artisan, one can repeat a successful roast on the CoffeeTech FZ94 roaster. Artisan pushes the buttons and moves the sliders to regulate airflow and heater energy at certain pre-planned intervals and the result is a practically identical roast graph. I only need to pre-heat the FZ94 (using a PID for precision), CHARGE the beans and I manually open the DROP door at the end. This is the profile of the first 'automatic' roast I did: I evened out the manual changes I made during previous roasts of the same beans (one of them is visible in the background) and made 'alarms' in Artisan that copy those changes. This is the second try which turned out almost perfectly the same: And a video of this second "Hands Off" roast: Some of the settings used: Events menu Alarms menu, item 1-22 Alarms menu, item 22-31 (note that some items are inactive for this specific roast routine) Buttons menu ...

Packed with another order that was delivered here tonight, Vince Fedele of VSTlabs added one of the new series of 25g filter baskets that they are now offering. Can't wait to try it out in the morning! PS 19 Oct 2017 Especially with very light roasts the result is spectacular. A most delicious taste explosion.

There's another FZ94 owner in town! In this case, in Budapest. Gabor Kormendi bought the FZ94 on display at the World of Coffee conference that's happening this week: It seems that the Coffee-Tech staff themselves are not yet equipped to demonstrate the use of the FZ94 in connection with Artisan on a computer but the hardware configuration of the machine is very similar to others working with Artisan so I do not see a problem there. Welcome to the FZ94 community of coffee roasters, Gabor, and keep in touch! I will be adding any news below in this blog entry. First roast by Gabor on his FZ94 Gabor writes: Its really fantastic to work with this roaster. Just end my first batch. What is interesting I didnt see the DeltaBeanTemperature Curve on the graph. Didnt find on the list. Do you have any advice? My reply is to check the Tools -> Extras -> Graph menu: Update 16 June 2017 One of Gabor's Artisan profiles of a 200g batch of Costa Rica beans:...

In March I purchased a 60kg bag of "Specialty prep Sumatra, wet hulled mandheling" for € 627. Green bean moisture 9,9% Profiles logged using Artisan , moisture measured with the Wile device , roast color from Tonino . Two friends took 15kg each and I roasted the rest myself. Below I post a few examples of roast profiles. What prompted me to share these profiles is a remark that fellow FZ94 owner Javier Reto mailed me this morning after he had tasted a sample roast of mine from one of the final roasts: By the way I pulled a shot of your beans at 16.3g in, 27g out VST 15 basket. Temp 202ºF on my Slayer with 8 sec pre infusion. Was one of the best tasting shots ever!!! The first try turned out a bit on the dark side for my taste and the RoR was also a bit level most of the time. In my notes you can see I was also working on different settings for the sliders. I sent 500g of these to my sister who first complained they were hard to dial in but a week later she was very...

COMPAK models R120, E8, E6 and E5 lined up next to LONDINIUM L-R First impression, notes after a visit from Roemer Overdiep: Roemer came over to taste espressos from all 4 grinders. We made sure to every time have 18g in the 18g VST basket, using the distribution tool, getting about 30g of espresso in about 30s. R120 was best, E8 ‘redspeed’ almost as good, the E6 and E5 were somewhat similar in that the espresso was excellent but in comparison with E8 / R120 it has more ‘sharpness’ — the R120/E8 were softer, more subtle. If someone has excellent beans, an excellent espresso can be prepared with the E5 and only if one also has the bigger E8 nearby would one notice there might be something extra in buying the bigger grinder. Difference between E5 and E6 seems minimal. These tests were done with a first roast of Kenya beans. We poured the beans from the hopper of one grinder to the other while testing and gradually the hippers got emptier. Data about these 4 different sizes gri...