i suspect some people read this blog & think we are anti-innovation/anti-progress
nothing could be further from the truth
what we do think is the vast majority of changes that are marketed as improvements to the performance of a product (any industry, not just coffee) are really cost reduction initiatives allowing the manufacturer to make the product more cheaply
belt driven coffee grinders would be an example that comes to mind, and so might ceramic burrs, water driven through the coffee with an electric pump another – you don’t have to agree, we are just providing some examples to get you thinking
so here are two ideas that if time and money permitted we would love to investigate further because we think they could be real innovations, not marketing fluff
1. a larger diameter portafilter. we firmly believe that for lever machines the bigger the group the better. but is 58.0mm the optimum? we don’t know. what would a 70mm group perform like??? perhaps someone in italy in the dim and distant past has tried and dismissed it already. but equally, the dominant foundry knocking out the groups may have started with the size their first customer requested, and that was that – the performance of larger groups was never investigated. on a lever group shifting to a larger diameter portafilter isn’t just affecting the surface area & depth of the coffee puck, it would mean the spring could travel a much shorter distance as the same volume of water could be contained in the much shorter column as the diameter of the column would be so much larger – approx 70mm for the purposes of discussion. this would have big implications for what could be achieved in terms of maximum spring pressure and pressure control throughout the extraction
2. a lever group made from copper. we firmly believe that a lever group tastes better because the temperature of the water is allowed to zoom from high to low (which incidentally is why we think PIDs are complete balls, before you get to the fact that the illuminated number you see with comforting tenth of a degree accuracy is not the actual temperature at all – there is an algorithm in place that is averaging the under and over response of the element). In a lever group all you need to do is control the upper and lower limits and the magic of physics does the rest as the brass group rapidly sucks the excess heat out of the water. but does a brass group offer the optimum rate of heat absorption? we would love to know what happens if you make the group from a material with a higher thermal conductivity than brass, like copper. obviously copper is more expensive and a lot softer, so it would need to be sleeved/bushed in some areas of high wear perhaps, but we think it might give an even better taste
anyway, there you have it, we’re not anti progress at all, we just think the consumer gets fed a load of bull most of the time, and if you throw enough marketing resource at it you can usually turn ‘the truth’ into whatever you like
new doesn’t always mean better, at least for the consumer