Sunbeam EM2300 (about twenty year) long term review

I've had this Sunbeam coffee maker since about 2004 and I paid about AU$100 for it when the Baby Gaggia was about $600

The unit dimensions (in cm) are: 31 high, 17 wide and 28 deep (front to back)

A good friend of mine had the Gaggia Classic and I wasn't sure I wanted to commit that much money (I was again a student at the time) and the Sunbeam appealed to me on the basis of price and benchtop footprint. I've always managed to have cramped kitchens. Indeed it features in this 2014 (whimsical comic) video I made when I was living in Finland and again you can see there was limited space on the benchtop.

So, yes, its been between Australia and Finland and back to Australia (more than once).

Basically its a single boiler system which is NOT a Termoblock (also something I don't really like), like so many machines in this pricepoint they have one of those baskets designed for noobs (or morons) which has a closed in base with a pinpoint hole to:

• provide emulsification of the oils to make a faux crema (to make the incompetent feel good immediately)
• give some back pressure for the pump to ensure flow rates and extraction with improper grinds (again, to make the incompetent feel good)

Being the guy I am (check out the DIY tag as well as the coffee tag for posts) I immediately took out my angle grinder and carefully opened that base up ...

which requires some of that outside be left around the edges of the base to be a support for what is essentially a pressed in mesh

I could have opened it up a wee bit more, but its sufficiently open (more than 90% open) now.

A weakness of the system is that the water from the top shower (more like a dome above the basket, which seals on the flat part of that basket rim) isn't so perfect in water distribution and so the system benefits from a nice (51mm) insert that lays atop the coffee and sits perfectly inside the basket

This has been such a great improvement to my shot consistency (which I've only had for a little over a year now).

The controls are quite rudimentary and if you are a noob (which sadly is who this machine is aimed at) you can stuff things up (perhaps not as much as you can with a Gaggia though).

1. the bottom switch turns the unit on and begins heating the boiler
2. the top switch starts the pump and you have to turn it off manually (just like the Gaggia)

However the "saving grace" of this system is that to activate the boiler you have to turn the steamer dial where a "cam" presses down on a microswitch inside to activate the "other heating circuit" to get steam up to pressure.

The upside of this is that unlike the Gaggia you can't accidentally have the boiler at well over 100°C and essentially "cook" your brew ... the downside is that it spits a little water for a bit as it starts to steam. I put a cup under it and you can learn to judge when's a good time to start steaming this way too (if you are the kind of person who learns by doing). Turning off the steam therefore also turns off the steamer circuit.

The machine doesn't power down, so (like the Gaggia) you'll have to remember to turn off the power.

With the lid off you can see the wiring and the two thermostats for the different temperature control (water vs steam). 

Frankly, for the money I think manufacture is simple and effective. That its lasted 22 years and been moved around a lot is a testimony to its reliability.

Milk steaming is in my opinion among the best and no extra work is needed to have a good simple chomed metal steam wand straight from the Get Go (unlike say the DeLongi ECP3630 which is perhaps the modern version of this design)

indeed the end unscrews easily for cleaning (should you happen to clog it by not clearing / cleaning it after use)

it even comes with a pair of cleaners (one small one for the little hole which I cut off the base of the basket anyway) that are under the lid of the removable water tank.

That about rounds up the machine.

Tips

I'll say that I think its important to always use filtered water (meaning filtration for ION's like Calcium) out of the water because that will destroy the boiler more quickly. Depending on your city or town water there can be a lot of ions in the water, so invest in a filter jug (I used a Britex, but no in Finland where water quality seemed excellent).

For those who want to get a bit more advanced in operation; you can actually have some "blunt" control over the water temperature that flows out of the group set. I find this important because in my dial in process with my beans I felt that my water temperature was a bit cool.  Claude suggested:

and while its hard to measure (because a very fine, light weight, sensitive and accurate thermometer needs to be used and the temperature will change as fresh colder water comes into the boiler), I believe mine is under that 93 mark. So I wanted to raise this a little.

My method goes like this and has the assumption that water boils quite reliably at 100C. Here, my altitude, is about 500m. Again I'll turn to Claude for a nicely formatted summary (of something I doubt is contentious)

I've confirmed this with my own (pretty decent, laboratory grade thermometer) and its quite close and begins sinking fairly quickly when you take the power away. 

To get my boiler up to 98 I can just turn on the the boiler again by opening the steamer knob just enough to hear the boiler begin to operate. By running it till water is just beginning to sputter out of the spout I know I've pretty much got to boiling (and it won't go past that point quickly with the boiler open).

I now turn off the knob (make sure its a bit firm or the pump will cause water to push out the steamer wand) and start the pump (obviously the handle / group set is attached through all this).

By getting a sense of how long (I used my phone's stop watch) it takes for the low roar of the boiler to start and spitting to begin, I can make an estimation of temperature because it will rise in a fairly linear manner.

This has made a great improvement to my medium roast coffee. I've since found others are doing this (so in case its not as obvious to the Noobs as it was to a chemistry and electronics guy) Tom calls it Temperature surfing:

He doesn't have a video on modifying the basket in the group set but there was no "easy purchase" option for me 15 years ago.

From here its about you, your taste, your grinder and your beans. I keep notes about my beans and what grind works for each, as its different.

Plenty of good discussions on the internet about this, but I happen to have a fair amount of time for what James says:

So remember the size (depth as well as diameter) of the basket and have a go at this video

Myself I find that 19g is about as much as I can get into my basket (and I've made a simple tool to achieve that in my grinder). 

its literally as simple as bit of grease proof paper that I've cut into a cuff that stands sufficiently above the rim of the basket. I just tap that down (by hand) then on the bench gently remove the paper cuff (pulling it up) while giving the the whole thing a quick "tap" back down on the bench to make the coffee settle into that small gap between "where the paper was" before you pulled it up. Note the small black dot, this and one on the other end shows the overlap so I can grab that and the other side and pull up keeping its shape ...

Importantly my grinder has a dial that allows me to adjust how long it grinds for, and its (electronically) linked to the grind size, (somewhat) and reports numbers on the digital display for both grind and time. This means I can repeatably get a dose as I change between beans.

Then have a watch of this video and see what you think. Ultimately start practicing, take notes and enjoy your coffee journey

There you have it, a great machine which I can honestly say "they don't make them like this anymore" for that price point.

I hope that this review even if you get something like a Delongi (a great machine too) and begin modifying that to help you get good quality coffee at home for yourself.

Enjoy

Old Abandoned Cottage

Since the 1990's on my travels up to Girraween (well, up in terms of altitude) I've driven past this cottage on a farm; its been abandoned for the whold of my experience with it.

I took this with my Toho 4x5 camera and scanned with an Epson. It was clearly quite a dry year (although its starting winter).

The cottage has featured in my post on Fireplaces in Australia. I drive past there from time to time, and back in 2018 was going past with a friend who wanted to look around. This shot is from a similar  angle to the above; but you can see not quite perfectly aligned with where I thought I was standing (not having made any reference as this was an ad-hoc opportunity).

The roof was off in places back then so I knew that the end was nearing

Yesterday I was riding past (on my way south) and thought I'd shoot a quick video from the bike showing its present state from the road side. It was a bit overgrown when down beside it, so this is just what I took from up on the hill.

So, until next time

Casio MRW-200 (analogue clarity with a rotating bezel)

I knew it would be vexing, but I bought it anyway ... because I had to know ...

As far as a watch goes it ticks all my boxes for an analogue watch:

• clear and easy to read (clearly differentiable hands)
• day, date complication
• bi-directional rotating bezel
• water resistant and rugged
• light
• accurate

I'm a big fan of bi-directional bezel because you can time lots of small things (that are perhaps 5 or 10 minutes) and then just rotate a little to "restart the timer". Its about here that the "Dive Watch" wankers will squeal about how it could cost me my life if I was diving. To which I would say "grow up and go do some diving (because I bet you haven't). Nobody relies on a watch like they did in the 1970's we all use a dive computer now. I totally DGAF about the ISO standard for Dive Watches because if you're a serious recreational or professional diver you'll actually be using a dive computer anyway...

ISO 6425: The Definitive Standard for Dive Watch Construction

Requirement	Detailed Specification
Water Resistance	Minimum 100 meters depth rating; tested at 125% of rated depth
Bezel	Unidirectional rotating bezel (only counterclockwise) to prevent accidental time extension
Legibility	Readable at 25cm in complete darkness; luminous hands and markers
Durability Tests	- Magnetic resistance (4,800 amperes across three axes)
	- Shock resistance
	- Thermal shock resistance
	- Salt water resistance (24-hour saline solution test)
Strap/Bracelet	Must withstand 200 newtons of force in each direction
Marking	Officially marked with "DIVER'S" when ISO tested

Mostly fussed about by people (incels) who don't dive and have never dived.

Anyway, as you can see I've put it on a strap (which was a NATO but had the useless flap removed as I've done for years now) and its pretty straightforward to fit (a nice standard 18mm lug width and good quality spring bars)

Watch thickness is about normal for this sort of thing (meaning too fucking thick).

for reasons I don't get modern watch buyers think things like this should be bricks on a strap, yet other  watches I have which are quarts and divers and have bezels and are made of steel are thinner, such as the bottom one here:

I don't know what's wrong with people today ... 

If you do go with a NATO then make sure its as thin as possible because its quite a tight fit in behind the spring bars. Naturally this also means that the watch isn't sat up as much with this insignificant extra thickness.

but it is what it is ...

the other Casio in my watch box is the lovely F-91W, which is pretty much my preference for my daily wear (you can call it a beater if you're into that sort of thing) and it ticks most my boxes (day, date and time, no bezel, but it does have a Chronograph {aka stopwatch}).

They're both light (clearly one is 30% lighter but its not an issue), the 200 is instantly telling me the time in all sorts of adverse condition (lume sucks about as hard as it gets, but the 91W backlight is legendary in its own right). However the 91 disappears into the wrist when wearing ...

...while I end up bashing the 200 on things a lot due to its bulk. 

Conclusion

I happen to like both, and I wear the 200 on those occasions where I value legibility higher than slimness (like I can glance at my arm and instantly see/recognise the time while riding my motorbike and I can't even see the digits on the 91W), as well its nice to be able to see the timer you've set/started  as well as the time (something the little digital can't do).

If I need to time something to the fraction of a minute then I'll use the F-91W with its chrono, but if I just want to know to within a minute how long it takes me to ride to (say, Stanthorpe) I'll wear the 200. I can just spin the bezel and go.

Both are tool watches that cost less than most tools spend on a watch (like a Rolex Explorer is a watch for a tool). Both have overlaps and both have strengths. 

Speaking of strengths the "hourly chime" on the 91W is not to be undervalued as a nice little reminder when writing ... "fuck, have I been here an hour?"

Its a great watch, so if you're even faintly inclined buy one; its only cost me about a weeks petrol.

measuring coffee extraction from beans

I wanted to know how much of what's coffee is extracted from the beans. There is lots written on this,  I didn't feel it gave sufficient details and so I decided to have my own go at this. I thought I'd start with the same thing and go two different ways.

the coffee

Methodologies

Method  one was to take the puck, weigh it first (in the basket/groupset tamped), extract the coffee and then dry it and weigh it after. 

Method two was to take the coffee I'd made, then remove the water (drying it) and weigh the remainder.

I did both.

Baseline:

I thought I'd ask an AI for a summary of things (I mean its what they do and it was a simple question):

Which felt like two different answers (and probably was).

Method 1

I weighed the basket (the group head steel basket), then added my usual amount of coffee (my grinder has a memory and produces pretty similar deliveries of grinds), then weighed the combined (tamped) basket and coffee, subtracted the basket and had 17.93g of coffee grinds. (side note: I also use this to work out my ratio for making a flat white as I do)

I banged out the puck (biscuit) and put it in the oven in a plastic bowl (11.7g) for drying at about 47C.

I kept inspecting and weighing and breaking the puck up and stirring with a fork, until eventually it became nice and dry

Method 1 working

So ultimately I seemed to lose 1.8g from the puck. Interestingly this result gave about 1g of loss per 10g of coffee, as identified in the first AI answer.

Concerns

I was thinking while doing this (the iterative stirring, checking and replacing) that I had no idea when was "Dry" and what the actual state of the water content of the beans was before I ground them. Because I knew that would be about 3% and how would I know what the water content of my drying was?

This was vexing and so I decided to approach it from the other end: what could be found by removing the water from the espresso.

Method 2

This method was similar but less measurement intensive. I would pull a shot, into the above demitasse and then weight would tell me how much coffee I had to start with (57.3g) (from 17.45g of beans) which is a bit more than I pull into my mug (I don't weigh, I use volumetric on the mug and judge that by taste then use the time for a pull to make it a bit more consistent)

I soon saw that it would take too long to dry that coffee out, so I tipped it into a shallow small dish that would allow faster drying (because surface area to volume ratio) and put both the cup (with some tiny amount of coffee in it) and the saucer into the oven for drying. I dried till it looked like freshly applied paint (but didn't touch it); not moving around at all (as liquids do) when inspected.

this gave a different result 4.68g (interestingly similar to the second AI answer). However what I don't know is what amount of "fines" came through (to add to that mass of coffee) and how much of water may remain bound to those coffee remains (its very hard to remove the water from a solution).

Conclusions

So now I have two answers of my own making and in some ways have not got just one answer. Reflection on this has led me to wonder if the best approach is to repeat method 1, but add in a "control" where I have ground coffee of the same mass and only put one through the espresso extraction process ,but both through the oven. This would mean that I could track the weight of the "control" grinds against the espressed grinds. Any loss of weight of the control sample could then be further subtracted from the final weight of the espressed grinds and I'd have an answer.

The only question at hand now is DIGAF