Visitors to our Burnsall Street studio may well remember our Italian Faema 1950s coffee machine which sat brooding, and steaming in the studio like some demented Wurlitzer organ. It required a certain skill to operate it ( goggles and asbestos gloves would have been useful ) but once you learnt the right sequence of valves to open and shut and levers to pull, it made great coffee.
Rather like a British steam engine, it began to get ever more unreliable, occasionally suffering from some unspeakable water tank / milk cross-contamination, and it fell into disuse and a sad state of disrepair.
Late last year I thought it was time to sort this out as it was like seeing your favourite old Thomas the Tank Engine toy sitting sadly in pieces everytime we went into our store room. Resisting the temptation to call upon the expertise of a shipyard ( Lurssen would have quoted delivery in 2017; Henk de Vries would have kept it and added it to his collection of vintage machinery; Benetti would have split it between Livorno and Viareggio; Heesen would have turned it into a high-speed semi-displacement coffee machine; Abeking said a German machine would be better whilst Trinity didn't know what espresso was and suggested we drink sweet iced tea ), we found someone who can only be described as a professor of coffee. In Italy, natch.
Over the following months Enrico Maltoni took our box of valves, springs and washers and disappeared into his workshop from where, like a scene from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, there would be noises of grinding and welding and polishing.
Now it's ready ! We have to prepare the studio accordingly - plumb in a cold water feed, teach Caroline to be a Barista amongst her many other skills and then invite everyone round for coffee, just like the old days.
Absolutely no orders for skinny / dry / soya lattes accepted, but for everyone else our door is open. Just give us four hours warning so we can build up steam.
