Is your wife single?
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I also choose this guys wife
Don't settle, find the one that'll install Gagguino mod on it.
That kind of attitude keeps people perpetually single.
Not wrong. 😄
Hell yeah! Congrats, that’s a great machine
I don't know if his wife would appreciate being called a machine
Thank you! I was super excited to set it up and play with it. Looking forward to lots of espresso with this machine.
Great machine, congrats
Tbh imo the best upgrades at first are less costly and much easier. You can get a shorter drip tray for like $12 and that makes using a scale much much easier. An open portafilter can be expensive but cheap ones exist too. Mine was like $30 and works fine, a good basket is like $10-20.
The opv mod is often not necessary depending on your model year but if it is that’s worthwhile because it’s dirt cheap (like a $3 spring) and simple to do.
after that imo a good grinder is where you should go if you don’t already have one. I recently got a Chinese grinder (mines branded mokkom but it exists under several names) that has 64mm flat burrs for like $150, which is crazy bc the next cheapest grinder with 64mm flat burrs is like $500. I’ve used it for a couple of months now and it performs well
The gaggiuino/gaggimate/pid stuff is really nice to have (I have gaggiuino installed, fwiw) but imo it makes more sense to get to know the machine well first. You don’t need any of this to make good coffee as you’ve found out. These help make it more repeatable and work better with things like lighter roasts
The brass boiler imo isn’t worth it. If your boiler is pitted a new aluminum boiler is like $30 whereas brass is over $200. If it’s not pitted you’re fine. If you have one of the ones from the few years they did a coated aluminum boiler they’ll probably replace it for free fyi. If you have one from one of those years (I think 2019? Could be wrong) steam into an empty cup after the boiler has sat a few days. If there’s a bunch of black flakes in it e-mail gaggia and they’ll likely replace it because they got a shitload of bad press for this issue
Again, congratulations. IMO the gaggia is the peak machine. Super simple construction and parts available everywhere so it can run smoothly basically forever, easy to repair, and it can make espresso on par with machines 5-10x the price with a few (relatively) simple mods. Even without those imo it outperforms everything in its price class once you get the hang of using it.
64mm flat burr grinder for $150? And I thought the DF64 was a deal..
https://mokkomcoffee.com/collections/coffee-grinders
$180 on their site but resellers often put it on sale. Worth looking at the other names too, shardor is one, and they can be cheaper too. Same design but slight differences (mokkom has metal housing vs all plastic for shardor, mokkom offers titanium coated burrs) but the same basic machine otherwise
The burrs aren’t as good as a df64 but for the price difference you could upgrade this to SSP red coated burrs and still come out ahead with even better performance
This is crazy either way. Makes sense tho, DF64 had no competition for a while and PRC is just getting into the quality electric flat burr grinders. The DF64's only expensive components are the burr set and the motor. I bet there's margin to cut.
Thanks for all the info! I appreciate it.
A shorter drip tray definitely sounds appealing, I’ll probably pick that one up soon. Everything else I’ll probably wait a while, but I’ll come back to your comment when I’m ready to upgrade/mod.
I'm happy for you, this is great. Also, Happy Early Birthday.
Thank you very much!
I don’t know that specific machine, but some advice in general for making good espresso at home
- Get a scale so you can measure inputs and outputs
- Upgrade your grinder before your machine
- A dosing funnel is really helpful, but not necessary
- Spritz your beans with a bit of water before you grind to eliminate static electricity
- A WDT is helpful for declumping the grounds if you don’t have a peak grinder
- A distributor and weighted tamper can help improve your puck prep
- You don’t need a rubber mat. Just get a towel to put down. I bought a 50 pack of “car wash towels” and use those for everything
- Clean your machine at least once a month
I have/do some of that already but I’ll look into incorporating the rest. Thanks for the tips.
Hey I have the same one and it was a birthday gift. I use it every day for 2 years and its beautiful. Grab some puro and deacale it every month. The first upgrade to help with consistency should be a burr grinder. I waited too long, and I gotta say it is a beautiful thing. I no longer pull watery shots. Secondly ali express has decent espresso tools for cheap, like distributers spring loaded Tamps, dosing rings, baskets, tamping stations and screens.
I got the same one! Be very delicate with the knob for the steamer wand, mine broke after a handful of uses. There are third party ones that are made of more resilient materials.
Happy coffee-making!
Oh interesting! I don’t do milk drinks but my wife does, I’ll let her know to keep an eye on it.
In saying that I wanted to learn latte art to surprise her with a nice drink so I will be using the steam wand for the next little while, so I’ll be careful with it too.
You have wired Internet on your kitchen?
Doesn’t everyone put their gaming pc right beside their kitchen sink? How else are you supposed to liquid cool?
Nah actually it’s for a landline. Used to be really common to have a home phone in your kitchen, at least in Canada anyway.
Oh! We had a wall mounted phone with a really long cord cord. It got burned I few times when it it the stove. US here
Ah yeah, makes sense. I wouldn’t want a phone near the stove honestly, seems like a recipe (ha) for disaster.
The phone itself wasn't close the stove. The extra long coiled cord for the handset occasionally found itself too close.
Since you got that used there is a chance that it has the older spring style pressure valve, which you can just adjust yourself. I did it to the used one I bought years ago, it was very easy.
https://www.blackoutcoffee.com/blogs/the-reading-room/gaggia-classic-opv-adjustment
I’ve heard that’s a pretty important upgrade, I was planning on doing it soon. Glad to hear it’s an easy upgrade.
If you have the model I'm talking about it isn't even an upgrade, it's just an adjustment. There's tools you need if you want it to be perfectly exact, but eyeballing it worked fine for me.
The newer ones you have to buy a replacement part though.
This is actually a very sneaky way of your wife telling you that you have too much free time.
We just did the Gaggimate recently, it's great. If you ever decode to do one of these, neither are FOSS, BUT while Gaggiuno went closed source a long time ago, Gaggimate has said they will always be source available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (a noncommercial free to do whatever with attribution license). That's what made the decision for me. I didn't want features locked behind closed doors.
That’s very good to know, that makes me lean more towards the Gaggimate. Thanks for the info.
Also check out the clevercoffe which is a fully open source project:
https://github.com/rancilio-pid/clevercoffee
It started out on the Rancilio Silvia, but Afaik also supports the Gaggia. You might want check out clevercoffee.de as well with Google translator as the project seemed to start out here in Germany (and probably is less known for that reason).
It's Esp32 based and has different completion "grades" from PID only functionalty to including Pump and pressure fine control and a scale to measure extraction speeds.
I had not seen this one. I will keep my eye on it, as the main thing it's missing is profiling.
Gotta learn to make some good cappuccino art to surprise her back now!
That’s the plan actually! I’m usually gone for work hours before she even wakes up so I’m planning on practicing latte art and surprising her on a day off when I’ve got it nailed.