Brand spanking new. Straight outta Italy. Finished less than a week ago.
Our La Marzocco GB/5 is here.
And man, did it feel good to unwrap it. I especially enjoy pulling off the film on the outside.
We had the good people at La Marzocco do a couple of special things on this machine: 0.6 mm flow restrictors (gigleurs) gives a much slower build up of pressure and when we tested this about a year and a half ago we felt it yielded much more body in the espresso. With a bottomless portafilter we noticed less channeling in general and the shots looked nicer.
However, we also noticed that we had to flush for quite a long time (4-6 sec.) to get the temperature stable. So on this machine we have also got the new hybrid / "Pierro" group caps. These eliminates the so-called banjo tube, where water had to pass on the outside of the group, thus achieving a much more stable temperature without the need to flush for as long.
Today we pulled the first shots off of the new machine, paired with a new Compak K-10 conical grinder and must admit it's awfully exciting to taste our blend like this. Lately a lot of people in the online community have seemed to be loosing faith in espresso, but stuff like this makes me feel very excited about the possibilities in this extraction method. Now we'll start dialing in the temp for our blend.
