David Morse is, improbably, no java junkie. “I’ve been working with coffee addicts for probably 12 years who tried to push it on me,” Morse says. “And eventually, I just fell in love with all of the mechanisms and engineering behind a shot of espresso.” Plus, adding milk and sugar resulted in something Morse actually liked: a latte.
Thus converted by his coworkers at Zipp, a bicycle component manufacturer, he decided to embark on an at-home engineering project: making an old-fashioned espresso machine. The lever device is more labor-intensive than what you see behind the counter at Starbucks, letting the user manually control how the espresso brews from start to finish. After procuring a combination of old parts (the vintage group head and boiler) and new (the touchscreen), Morse is now set with as many lattes as he’d like. The cost? About $550. To him, it’s a bargain.
“The gold-standard La Pavoni lever machines are $800 for the base model,” he says, “and not even the top-end model for $2,300 comes with PID temperature control or pressure sensors.” Who’s hot stuff now?