New equipment has arrived!

Labs get a lot of equipment when they just get set up. If you scroll back in this blog you will see how over the course of several years we went from an empty room to an entangled maze of pumping lines, cables and wires held in place by copious quantities of duct tape. But once a lab has been set up, and the startup funds have run out, a stationary period commences – and it can last for a loooong-long time, until the original stuff starts to break down.

Well, not the case in our brave lab! We just got a piece of equipment which inspired us to work harder, put idiotic smiles on our faces, started numerous stimulating discussions and is just generally awesome.

Here it is:

I am talking, of course, about our new bottomless portafilter. A portafilter is a holder with a black handle where you load and tamp ground coffee in order to extract espresso. A ‘bottomless’ portafilter has the nozzle on the bottom machined off so that you can see with your own eyes how espresso is formed, whether liquid is uniformly going through the basket or gushing through a crack in your puck, whether there is a lot of crema and so on. This has improved the quality of our espresso truly to the 3rd generation coffee shop level, and it has already improved the skills of our baristas-in-training.

Oh… and we have also received two additional dilution refrigerators, but I suppose that deserves a separate blog post.