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

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

best yet pour over filter coffee system

I've been a keen coffee nut for some 40 years (so since I was young) and over time I've been through a few different methods of making coffee. Two methods have stuck:

1. Espresso 
2. Pour over

I've had brief forays into Plunger (the fancy folk call it French press) and naturally when camping use the Pot Immersion (and sedimentation) style that was with us for centuries. In the workplace I've tried Nespresso pods but fallen back always onto a plastic V60 style of "on the cup" filter because its compatible with the office kitchen, its quick and I can pick the coffee beans I like. I first encountered these in Japan in the year 2001 and they were pretty common in the Hyaku-yen shops for about 100yen. However I always lamented the loss of the oils (absorbed by the paper, which could be tasted in plunger style) but favoured the clean taste without the inevitable grind "fines" that you get with a plunger (esp in the second cup). 

I've read of filters which relied on fine metal mesh (even as early as the 1990's) but there were rare and expensive. However I recently discovered this stainless steel one from China (via Ali and eBay)

This has a fine metal mesh on the inside and has some holes in the steel to allow some sort of bypass on the outside, however in reality while some might make its way down the outside and into the cup it would seem that the water passes between the mesh and the steel ... dunno. The mesh is a fine weave that's for sure.

looking from the outside we can see through the holes in the steel to the size of the mesh. My phone has a pretty good microscope which shows this clearly.

Its amazingly fine.

So now I get excellent pour over which has almost no "fines" (or sludge) in the bottom of the cup, a great mouth feel and taste and has renewed my coffee drinking methods.

Price was also amazingly good at AU$12 (including postage), but even at $20 I would not hesitate.

Its surprisingly tolerant of grind size, so as long as its anything in the ballpark of "Supermarket" ground coffee (for those who grind their own, I go a bit coarser), but still I tested it today on my usual espresso grind and that worked quite well (although a bit slow) and still no fines!

Its win win and the only thing against it is that you need to spend a bit more time "washing it" than if you just pull out a paper and dump it. Filter papers are king for convenience there!

If you haven't tried one, give it a go.

(DIY) coffee banger - updated

well, having moved house twice since 2012 when I wrote about my coffee banger last I felt the need for a new one in my new place. As per my last post (here) I still don't see the point in paying $30 for what is essentially a waste holder (holding it before it gets transferred to the bin).

So let me introduce my Mk2 coffee banger:

I was inspired by some connections of roof gutter drainage pipes that were for connecting and angling the pipes.

This is essentially two pieces of 90mm PVC-U, one a 22.5 elbow bend and the other a "cap".

Pressed onto the bottom, the cap makes a good removable base, which is handy because often after a few days the coffee in the bottom of the banger is a bit hard to clean out. This design just allows the bottom to come off with a twist (its a tight seal, nearly, but not watertight), yet the rim on the cap keeps the damp grounds from leaking out.

I used my dremel to cut some (rough) grooves to hold my traditional "stick" in place, with some assistance from a bit of hot melt glue which will no doubt come off easy as the stick (inevitably) needs replacement.

The bend makes an almost ideal angle for striking the banger stick with the coffee handle and the "rim" catches the splashes from small amounts of water left in the handle.

So, in summary, its:

• durable
• cheap (less than $5)
• easy to make
• easy to clean

win win!

reusable Coffee Pods (review and experience)

I bought these a while back on eBay because I wanted to see how they went (to shut someone with a big eco mouth up)

Basically this product reduces the internal volume available in an already small pod.

So for those who fuss and agitate on about how bad pods are for the environment you can buy these and pat yourself on the back ... while drinking bad weak coffee.

In terms of the product itself, the pods are well made and of good construction.

However they (being reusable) require you to fish them out of the pod "bin" under the coffee maker to reuse them. In any office situation this will become fraught and for sure someone is going to bin your pod by mistake.

Then you have to ask yourself - how much water are you going to waste in washing them?

If pods bother you so much then either A) get the plastic empty disposable types (which I currently use because I can put my prefered coffee in them) or B) use a proper coffee machine which just grinds and uses the beans (like I do at home).

Pods are generally a bad idea for the sake of convenience - this product take the convenience out of that equation and just makes pods worse.

coffee pods

I happen to be a coffee aficionado (or snob, depending on your view) and have made espresso myself with my reliable old Sunbeam for quite some years. I've had this espresso machine just over 10 years, had others before it and used a variety of other methods over the decades too. Personally I've settled on espresso as being the best for speed and quality.

Ages ago Pod machines started to appear and I laughed at them.You couldn't see what your coffee was like, you couldn't smell the ground beans and you didn't know how well packed it was (or should I say "tamped"). You had no way to guage if it was going to be good quality coffee or poor quality coffee for the major inputs (sight and smell) were removed. But it was sexy looking packaging

even if you can't see or smell the coffee that you wake up to ...

Initially I felt that they were for those who were:

• too helpless / silly to know how to make coffee or
• too important to have the time to learn or
• too wealthy to care (which usually is the above two rolled into one)

Recently Pods have become much cheaper with Aldi selling them now for $6 for a pack of pods being about the cheapest I've seen yet.

Now personally I think pods are acceptable in an office environment when no one will own up to cleaning or maintaining the machine as well as for people who are occasional coffee drinkers (read, don't drink coffee much but offer it to guests), but for anyone who likes their coffee and has any sort of capacity to do anything themselves they just don't make sense. I don't mind the whole scene, as its got its purpose.

However I too freqently have people telling me (or hear them telling others) how good pod coffee is and how they can't tell it from the coffee they get in a Coffee Shop. Well don't say that in hearing range of the barista is all I can say. To me such admissions are tantamount to saying

• "I can't tell crap from quality" or 
• "I haven't got taste buds or a functional olfactory system".

again, either is fine by me. So for those who have never had a coffee machine (only a pod one) I thought I'd show you some differences.

Smell the Coffee

The first thing you notice (well if you're used to handling coffee) is that with the pods you don't get to smell the coffee, because its sealed inside a pod. Below is a picture of a typical pod beside a relatively standard sized coffee basket (the bit in the handle which holds the coffee)

I think its pretty clear that the pod is much smaller than the basket is ... but its not just about that point either (although size does matter).

An important step in making a good coffee is the right level of "tamp" on the coffee so that it provides the right level of resistance to the water and facilitating the extraction of the coffee in fractions (IE different parts come out at different times). When you cut the plastic cap off the tightly sealed pod you notice two things:

1. you finally get to smell the coffee and it does not have a good aroma
2. its very loosely packed

Here is how I pack my basket beside the pod (where you get it as it happens to be)

As you can see there is room for more in there and if I tamped it down (which is not possible) it would  perhaps cause a problem for the coffee maker. At least the grind seemed appropriate. However without a proper tamp its unlikely you'll get a good crema (and gosh lookie there you don't)(except some newer machines have a "crema enhancer" built in).

To see how different the amounts of coffee are lets tip it onto a plate.

basically its about double (well as the size of containers would suggest).

According to the back of the box the pod will give:

• a 25ml ristretto
• a 40ml espresso
• a 110ml lungo

For those who have never actually measured it, a typical demitasse (like you'd get at a coffee shop) is about 60 ~ 90ml. Mine comfortably holds 60ml, but I normally only put 40ml into it.

This means that given the volumes of grounds I'm drinking a ristretto and if you actually put only 25ml from your pod into a demitasse I'm sure you'd think I was ripping you off.

Economics

On that subject lets look at costs: the pods cost about $6 and you get 16 capsules and a total of 128g of coffee. Sure for the maths challenged that's only 37c a cup, but looking at it another way that's $46/Kg for coffee. Other brands are as high as $98/Kg. I buy my coffee at one of the good roasters of coffee in my area (read its an up-market place with high prices and my friends will say that its expensive), and my coffee (ground for me by them) costs $22/Kg. So basically the pod costs from a bit more than double what I pay for coffee to up to 5 times more.

Of course its clear that I use more coffee (you could always use a smaller basket, but shit, why waste your life on weak coffee?), nearly double what's in a pod, so the economics could also be viewed that I pay the same (than the cheapest pods) or less than half for the others - but for a better coffee.

Lastly (and why would anyone care?) using Pods generates heaps more packaging waste ... but like I said ... why would anyone care about that?

By Royale Appointment

So to me it seems that if your argument is pods are for convenience ... well I guess ... but so too is drip filter coffee, and you get to smell the coffee too. If you consider you are getting poor quality for twice the price then I really don't see why you'd do it.

If after this you still argue that the pods are as good as the coffee shop, then either change coffee shop or admit that you really are devoid of the capacity to taste or smell and you should stick to tea bags or instant coffee.

I expect that many from the Kingdom of Wang will just poo hoo this post and say how good their pods are. I mean after all, the Emperors clothes really are fine.

Enjoy