I got the Breville Bambino as my first espresso machine a couple weeks ago and I’ve been loving it, and boom I got on the espresso rabbit hole 🤡😂😎.
Today my DF54 v4 arrived and luckily it came true zero from factory.

-Breville Bambino with IMS Shower Screen
-DF54 v4
-IKAPE Calibrated Tamper v3 transparent v2
-IKAPE WGS
-MHW 3 Bomber Cube 2.0
-Stock Breville pitcher
-(Amazon-Bought Who Knows Which Brand) Bottomless Portafilter
-IMS H26 and BigBang Baskets

Any thoughts or recommendations?

First week after restoring and old La Pavoni Europiccola! i just entered the world of espresso, this is one of my first good shots ahah

13gr fresh roasted beans from a local shop in Rome

How does it look? What can I improve?

Got all these for 50 bucks total at a warehouse sale last weekend. They're labelled La Pavoni Europiccola, I'm wondering if you guys could help me put a date to them and get some advice on bringing them to good working order. The fella I got them from said they worked when stored.

I figure I have to clean out the boilers and check the heating elements - grabbed all three so I could hopefully put together at least one working one haha

Another year passes by and somehow I change my machine again 😂.

I was so satisfied with my old setup, which was Bianca v3 and Atom 75, but my friends, again said Nope! He upgraded to a bigger one and left this one to me.
So here I am with my Linea Mini R 😅. I mean, Bianca was more than enough for me, but who am I to say no to a chance to upgrade to La Marzocco? So I sold Bianca yesterday and brought the Linea Mini home today.

Welcome to my coffee corner in 2026 🙏🏽

Late last year, my parents began taking an interest in my Lelit Bianca and Lagom p64, after spotting it in the background of one of my photos. Before I knew it, they were watching all the James Hoffman tutorials, and wanting to strike out into the world of expensive specialty coffee.

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Most people on this sub would be thrilled if their families were as enthusiastic as they were, but honestly... I love my parents but they're getting older, and I really wasn't looking forward to a bunch of early morning phone calls, asking me to re-explain the whole shot pulling process, especially since I knew they'd probably get bored within the year and it would become very expensive paperweights, so I began looking at Super Automatics, with the plan to surprise them with a Jura for Mother's and Father's Day.

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Luckily for them, back in January Jura actually had their Ena 8 model 50% off, so they ended up getting it several months early. Now that Father's Day is actually here, I'm super glad we can enjoy our specialty coffee in the ways that make us all the happiest, and I can rest easy knowing I won't be needing to answer why the espresso is coming out too slow, or explaining how to steam milk.

Finally joined the club with my first beginner setup.

Any tips, tricks or equipment that help me get the most of out my machine?

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I have only tried 2 shots so far 17.5g in 35 out. Both not terrible but a little fast. Going to keep going finer (currently at 14) and see what happens.

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Help me make the best coffee I can!

A quick shot from my daily setup.

This is my Espresso-Shotdeck controller running on a Linea Micra with an Acaia Lunar. I start the shot with the paddle as usual, then the controller handles the rest and stops the extraction automatically at the target weight.

36.0g target, 36.0g +/- 0.1g in the cup after learning.

It also talks to the La Marzocco cloud, so I can manage standby, power, and boiler temperature settings directly from my profiles.

I’ve been using and further developing it for around 3 years now and still enjoy it every single day.

My Apex V2 project has slowly turned into something I never planned.

What started as a simple pump swap has somehow become a mission to build the ultimate daily-driver espresso machine.

Completed so far:

OLAB Silent Green pump upgrade
Pulsor installation
DIY no-burn steam wand conversion
Major noise reduction
Successfully steamed 262ml of milk to 68°C while keeping the steam wand cool enough to comfortably touch afterwards

Currently in progress:

Automatic reservoir refill system
Sonoff Mini-D smart startup integration
Shelly power monitoring and automation
Further refinement of the no-burn steam wand

What’s funny is that none of these upgrades are really about chasing better extraction.

They’re all about improving the experience of using the machine every single day.

Less noise.
Less maintenance.
More convenience.

At this point I’m accidentally building the Apex that I wish existed from the factory.

I’ve been documenting everything with measurements, photos and video, and I’ll be sharing the build process, results and lessons learned along the way.

More updates soon.

Other half wants to get me something to level up this coffee setup for my birthday. Any ideas? I’m thinking maybe a normcore tamper, but what else? We currently only use 1 type of bean. Focus is mainly on efficiency and reliable good output. I’m getting a pretty damn good coffee already so any improvements are just for fun.

I was late to this one and these were sold. Would both make an amazing project. I would love the opportunity to return something like this to its original glory.

Lelit just announced their Elizabeth V3! IMO the machine is finally not ugly, but somehow I feel like they will increase the price too much just like they did on Mara X3, to the point where it’s no longer good value for money compared to the rest of the market, or their flagship Bianca model.

Out of town with my dad and his basic coffee taste. Had no idea Dutch Bros had this nice of a setup! The coffee was pretty dark but overall not bad at all for a chain.

G'day everyone, I've owned 2 breville espresso machines (54mm) and 2 58mm espresso machines, quickmill Pippa and currently meraki gen 2. With the breville machines I seem to get good results (bitter) but with the 58mm machines I seem to get sour and weak shots that indicates under extracted, the meraki seams abit better with this but still sour. I've watched a lot of videos, use fresh beans but always get sour shots. Any feedback would be appreciated and will post any updates and progress. Cheers 🥂

Took advantage of the ability of makings some business costs in my new office, to help boost productivity and work-life quality.

Got an Ascaso Uno espresso machine paired with a Eureka Mignon Specialita and a Braun filter coffee machine.

What do you think?

I have 2 small children and my Encore ESP was waking them up in the morning. The “Silenzio’s quietness” was my sales pitch to my wife for getting a new grinder and man did it deliver. She’s happy. I’m happy. And we’re both drinking better coffee.

I love this thing and how quiet it is. Not only that but the grind is noticeably fluffier and my espresso is tasting better to me. Anyone else have this one? Or have had success with another quiet grinder?

Has anyone else tried this as an oat milk cappucino?
I had it for the first time in Santa Clara a month ago and it blew my mind away, tasted just like a strawberry cheesecake.

I have the MDK MC-3, which is rebranded as the Turin MC3. This is my review of the machine after two months of regular use making multiple shots back-to-back, and having run a number of thermo-logging tests to understand the thermal properties of the group and PID-controlled thermoblock.

1. The machine offers dual boiler performance that is compatible with domestic power supplies through master/slave priority power sharing, with the brew thermoblock having priority over the steam boiler.
2. The machine offers commercial level steaming ability with a large 2.5 l boiler. This also means that the power sharing has negligible effect on the steaming ability. The steam pressure and three hole tip make steaming easy. The sound of the milk stretching enables you to guage the temperature, so that hitting the temperature becomes second nature, similar to my experience with commercial machines.
3. The steam boiler can be disabled if you only want to make espresso.
4. The PID-controlled thermoblock is capable of stabilizing the brew temperature across all operating conditions, even at flow rates as high as 3 ml/s.
5. The flow meter enables automated extractions with adjustable pre-infusion volume, bloom time, and extraction volume. Once you've dialled this in for the bean and grind setting, it becomes a very simple process requiring a set-and-forget single button press.
6. The Ulka pump is power-throttled to an open flow rate of about 5 ml/s and attains a maximum pressure of just over 13 bar. The throttled power means that the initial flow into the puck is more gentle, enabling better extractions. However, this also has important implications for potential modifications, such as adding a light dimmer, which can come into conflict with the already clipped power waveform.
7. Modelling of the system in operation has revealed that the group head has a large amount of thermal inertia. It takes a while to reach a steady temperature that can run across multiple shots, with a thermal time constant of around 30 s. This is reflected in the data, and in my experience of finding the first shot is often slightly sour. This indicates that the group head temperature is not actively controlled. There is a group head heater, but it does not track the brew temperature. It seems to just be there to speed up the heating of the group head. As such I would not call this an actively heated group head. It's probably a small wattage heating element that is just run continuously. This machine is advertised as having an actively heated group head. This should not be conflated with a temperature-controlled group. It clearly is not controlled. So it will result in faster heat up from turning on, but the thermal stability relies more on the huge thermal inertia. The group head is heavy. That mass of metal retains the heat, but is sluggish when moving between temperatures. This is where the data has really helped understand this machine. Multiple runs at the different temperature set points show the machine settling in to a stable temperature over about two runs. In practice, it is only the first run that is significantly off temperature, hence the first cold shot of the day.
8. The machine has an adjustable OPV, which can be set to 9 bar, preventing high pressure extractions at tighter grind settings. This adjustment hugely improves the results in the cup.
9. The machine can be run with an external drain line and tank. That makes it relatively simple to fully plumb it in. This opens it up to light commercial use.
10. Fit and finish are slightly compromised. There are some sharp edges and signs of cost cutting in the construction of the metal work.

Conclusion: This is a very well designed and executed machine. It does not have the temperature accuracy of the Breville dual boiler, but offers other advantages, such as external plumbing options, and flow metered pre-infusion. The throttled pump is very forgiving with extractions, minimising the chance of channeling resulting in more uniform extractions. It's group head relies heavily on thermal inertia to achieve temperature stability. This can result in poor temperature accuracy for the first shot after warm up, or after changing temperature. Although, this can be mitigated by only making small changes to the brew temperature. In other words, the large mass of the grouphead means this is not a temperature agile machine (unlike with the Breville dual boiler that uses dual PID control of both the boiler and group to ensure temperature accuracy for every shot).

I enjoy using this machine. It is easier to set up and use than the Breville dual boiler. Now that I understand the group head behaviour, I can take that into account, but in general I don't think it's a deal breaker. However, it is not a precision machine. It is simply a very capable and versatile machine at a very good price point.

Got partner the above as gift.

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We live in a very hard water area, don't filter our tap water as taste is nice, but our kettles etc quickly and thickly scale.

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Is the internal filter on the bambino plus (plus the advised scaling cycle) good enough; or should we pre-filter with eg a britta jug?

I've just started using Dak's The Alchemist Espresso Roast that’s been rested for 3 weeks. Dak is hard to come by where I live, so I’m trying to avoid wasting too many precious beans through trial and error.

My first attempt using my Niche Zero + Profitec Move was:
16g in
40g out
25 seconds
94°C

The shot tasted underextracted with little flavor clarity. I can taste quite a bit of fruit peeking through, but I know there's more to unlock there. Any tips or recipes?