I'm from Italy and it's the first time I see this brand. Anyone could explain why it costs an order of magnitude more than a Delonghi with similar specs?
If you compare it to a regular home coffee machine the Rancilio contains more metal. The portafilter (the thing with the handle that contains the basket where the coffee grinds are put) is the same as their shop grade machines. It's big and heavy and feels solid like it'll last a long time. While if you compare the portafilter of a regular home coffee machine they often feel cheap and flimsy. The switches on the front feel industrial too. With the exception of a few bits (as noted in the article) the exterior is mainly stainless steel. While other home coffee machines at similar price point (and above) are far more plasticy.
The Siliva is often a good introduction for home coffee enthusiasts and hardware hackers alike. They're often recommended on coffee snob forums as a result. They're fairly ubiquitous so getting parts is straight forward. IIRC The manual contains circuit diagrams. It's easy to open and tinker with too. The most common modification is adding a PID controller to regulate the temperature.
The machine itself is straightforward but fills a niche. The next level up of more expensive home enthusiast machines generally cost at least twice the price. The next level up of coffee machine generally includes a PID and often twin boilers, so you can use one boiler for shots and the other boiler to foam milk. While with the Siliva as it's only got a single boiler you have to do your shots first, then switch it over to steam mode.
If you look after Siliva it can last for 10 years or more (I've had mine that long and it's still going on). I really want a duel boiler machine, but I'm trying to figure out which ones are good at the moment.
It'd say a Delonghi with similar specs is aimed at someone more causal. The kind of audience George Clooney is targeting with Nespresso. While the Siliva is not aimed at someone who just wants a coffee. You have to learn how to make decent coffee and for that it needs to be paired with a good grinder.
Check out the Brewtus (Expobar Minore IV). Double boiler, E61 group head, PID. God shot territory every pull.
It does, I bought one (new, latest model) recently and was thrilled to see that. I've bought ~'80s amplifiers on eBay and loved that the manuals have circuit diagrams, and thought it was a lost era.
The Silvia's is far simpler (to state the obvious) but a wonderful inclusion.
Even though it's fairly readily determined, given its simplicity, it'd make me more confident in any repair or modification.
The one I have been thinking of is replacing the pump and reservoir with (a pressure reducing valve and) an electronic valve plumbed in, so that I never have to top-up, or risk the boiler running dry.
My DeLonghi has lasted 8 years so far and I didn't treat it too well. I guess I might not be an enthusiast above the level of Clooney, but this feels to me a lot like bikes and dentists :)
And Niche Zero for grinder.
Result: Waaaayyyy over the (German) limits for lead in drinking water.
I wanted to sell it but added to the post that I wanted to wait for the results, and that I would scrap it and not sell it if there was lead. There were several people who still wanted to buy it. As someone who has had to have treatment with chelators, albeit against mercury, I have seen what those academic and abstract warnings "there is no amount of lead (or mercury) that does not do damage" mean in practice: With my (university clinic researcher) doctor's consent I continued chelation far beyond any of the "limits" (i.e. when tested levels had fallen below any official limits in urine or blood I still continued, for years). It STILL had an effect, and it was recognizable in objective symptoms, not just subjective ones.
For almost 100% of people the dangers of lead (or heavy metals or environmental poisons in general) are way too abstract to be taken seriously. I've given up - actually I never really seriously tried, and if so only by short comments such as these and never to anyone in person in order to not ruin relationships - to convince anyone. Those poisons don't make you sick in small quantities, they just, very, very gradually, make you function worse. Since this is 100% correlated with aging, since it takes a long time, all those effects will a) be part of your life, you got used to it gradually, b) attributed to age. Only if you do were to do something really extreme such as what I did (had to, was forced to by circumstances) would you be able to see a difference. For what it's worth, my doctor too thinks this is vastly under-recognized and a much bigger problem than even the vast majority of doctors think. The only reason I now it was not "stress" or "age" is because a long list of quite common ailments is completely gone now, from occasional small localized short cramps to psoriasis to warts to only mention three common ones.
I would not buy that machine. There are lead-free alternatives. I have a Vibiemme Domobar (with PID). This particular machine uses copper everywhere, even all the small parts of the E61 brewing group, which I've only ever seen with brass parts everywhere else. I had its water tested too, no lead whatsoever, but elevated copper - which is a non-issue (the body has far better mechanisms to handle copper, since it's an essential metal, reflected in the official limits in drinking water, which are several orders of magnitude higher for copper).
Is this a sensible comparison to make? You will likely be drinking at most 120ml (4 shots) of rancilio espresso per day, which is around 4% of your daily ~3L recommended water intake.
How high were the results, anyway?
There is no such thing as "safe lead exposure limit".
This is a myth. You're supposed to have around 2 l of water, from all sources: meaning that you'd have to eat only freeze-dried food to actually need that much water.
Now let's suppose it dies now, it would have cost me 10 euros per year. I would have to keep a Roncilio for 64 years to get the same bang for the buck. I'm starting to think that maybe it's a volume problem, you need to make coffee for at least 10 people daily and then you might see a difference.
Also I think that living in a place where a good espresso costs less than a euro makes it kinda hard to justify a coffee machine that costs almost as much as a used car... :)
I inherited an early model one from a family and have passed it along after it’s first and only professional service ($30US). It’s made approximately 15k coffees in its time.
I'm biased because it's Australian, but I'm in love with the Breville Dual Boiler. The portafilter has non-standard dimensions which vexes me a little, but it pulls phenomenal shots; I've found the quality to be similar to the La Mazzocco GS3, while being literally one tenth the price.
Oh and the steam wand is lovely.
I had a love-hate relationship with it, the group head design was very forgiving, it required almost no technique to pull a very good shot, could be left on for a long time and be instantly ready, powerful steam, heated up fast etc. Really an ideal home machine except for being a total POS.
Every few months when I had to repair it I thought about replacing it but there really wasn't anything out there with the combination of shot quality and ease of use and small kitchen practicality. The E61 machines are large, require good technique, use a lot of water, generate a lot of heat and probably are not that much more reliable as they are also sort of craft workshop built. The Silvia is overrated and very fiddly, it can make great shots, if the stars are just so. Manual levers are fetish objects for collectors, coffee hobbyists, and masochists.
What I really wanted was a modern design built with modern processes, ie a Tesla, not a Fiat 124 Spider from the 60's.
Enter the Breville 920XL dual boiler. It makes better coffee and is even more forgiving and consistent than my old Ponte Vechio. It heats up fast and steams well. I don't love the tamper as much as my old rosewood and brass one for the Ponte Vecchio, but the magnetic tamper holder is one of those tiny details that makes me happy every shot. Two years in it's been perfect, except for just the tiniest steam wand valve leak recently. Time will tell, but since I got it at Costco, I'm out nothing if it's a problem.
The Silvia works perfectly every time. But you need to know something about making coffee i.e. roast, grind, dose, tamp, temperature, time, yield, steam, pour etc.
The Lusso and the Breville will make great shots if your grind and tamp are even close. My wife and child both could regularly make great shots after a few minutes demo with either of those. I do adjust the grinder from time to time as the coffee ages or when we get new beans, but that's it.
I don't think that would be possible with the Silvia.
Professional coffee machines are just tools. It's the barista who takes responsibility for making coffee.
You can get perfect shots every time with the Silvia. It's not difficult. You just need to understand what you're doing.
If you enjoy your Breville though, that's great!
Holy moly $7k?!
It's more like a hobby than just a coffee maker for some people.
I inherited a consumer DeLonghi, that basically looks like most of their espresso machines and it's nothing like a professional machine. They use dual wall instead of single wall filter baskets, the steam wand differs a lot and my machine shoots a couple of jets of water into the coffee, preventing even extraction.
I did however happen to find beans that got decent results on that machine, so it's not like there's a strict total order of quality that leads to a one dimensional result. Professional machines are much more pleasant to work with, though.
It is. A 58mm tamper fits perfectly from memory. The early ones shipped with a weird little aluminium one that should be avoided. All the bits in them are easily replaced. My best upgrade was refitting the mesh screens screw with a nut so that you weren’t trying to unscrew it with a tiny screwdriver, upside down.
Traditionally espresso is extracted with high pressure (9 bar) water. That pressure is build on top of the coffee. When the water passes the coffee and its pressure drops it foams up. This foam is the only way most people can tell they've got an espresso and not some other coffee drink.
To be able to build up 9 bar of pressure the coffee has to be fairly fine ground and, most importantly, fresh. Most people do not want to bother with grinding coffee and buy pre-ground. Pre-ground coffee cannot build enough resistance to create any significant foam. So the appliance-level machines, targeted for pre-ground coffee, come with a valve in the portafilter after the coffee. That valve creates espresso-like foam in the resulting drink, which is not much different from a regularly brewed coffee otherwise. Using these machines with a fresh grind is also problematic - they usually miss overpressure valve before coffee and sport a standard 15-20 bar vibro pump. This results in pressure building up way above 9 bar and fracturing the coffee layer, directing all water through narrow channels and missing most of the grounds.
tl;dr it's pretty hard to make proper espresso with a Delonghi.
Espresso grind is special. It's not just fairly fine grind, it's a mix of fine, moderate and coarse grinds that are packed together. If you are to try and use just an uniformly fine grind for espresso, the machine will have very hard time extracting from it - literally a drop a second instead of a flow.
If this had been true, you could just toss coffee grounds into hot water and it would foam up.
> If you are to try and use just an uniformly fine grind for espresso, the machine will have very hard time extracting from it - literally a drop a second instead of a flow.
Really? Any uniformity in grind will block machine? Could you explain physics behind such phenomenon please?
Jeez, dude... That's EXACTLY what happens. It's called a "bloom". Here, first hit in Google - https://www.roastycoffee.com/coffee-bloom/
>Really? Any uniformity in grind will block machine? Could you explain physics behind such phenomenon please?
Yes, really. Give it a try. Better yet, read a book on a subject. Something like Blue Bottle's intro into coffee making.