This isn’t going to be a machine review. There are plenty of those done in great detail on a variety of forums and blogs. Plus it only just arrived today!

This sort of thing makes me childishly pleased, and it was pretty easy to setup. The autofill takes care of most of it, and after bleeding the group (not too difficult) and correcting the expansion valve (mine appeared to have been set at 5 bars instead of 12 bars, which was quite interesting when you hit brew all the water just went into the drip tray with nothing coming out of the group!) it was ready to go.

I haven’t Scace’d it yet – Anette was teaching all day and had mine with her – but I will play tonight, though I don’t expect to discover much. Instead it was time to pull some shots and see if I still enjoy espresso. It turns out I do – I had some coffee given to me by Peter James and having messed around with the manual pre-infusion I pulled one of the best shots I’ve had in ages! A wonderful creamy texture and yet light, clean and sweet. Splendid.

I’ll be messing about with it a lot more over the next few weeks and I have to say it is a great tool for espresso which I’ve only just scratched the surface of (anyone got any PID settings they want to pass on?)

I had read people had had issues with steaming – I have to say I had no problem though it will take a while before the placement of the lever becomes normal. My only real complaint at the moment is that there seems to be a bug in the software which means I can’t change the first letter of the name to anything but L, which is really quite odd. (Anyone had similar issues?) This isn’t really a complaint – I am having a lot of fun with this machine. Expect lots of silly espresso pics on my flickr!

A little espresso porn