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Sprometheus's video about Rao's Allongé on Decent and LMLM
Quite a nice video about Scott Rao's Allongé, which "Sprometheus" decided to make. He borrowed a DE1, and compares the taste to his Linea Mini version of the Allongé.
-john
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Sprometheus's video about Rao's Allongé on Decent and LMLM
Quite a nice video about Scott Rao's Allongé, which "Sprometheus" decided to make. He borrowed a DE1, and compares the taste to his Linea Mini version of the Allongé.
-john
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Article: how Decent uses Basecamp
Basecamp CEO (and Decent owner) Jason Fried has written a nice article about how we use their software, with a focus on their most recently released "multiple tools" feature.
https://updates.basecamp.com/post/ho...multiple-tools
Basecamp is deeply, deeply used here, down the the factory floor, repairs, and in our supply chain. Each machine gets its own Basecamp page, with test logs, videos, photos, problems and solutions, all tracked in that "machine file". Our main suppliers each have separate Basecamp projects with us, where we discuss our work with them.
Jason and I are planning a series of video "Basecamp master classes" that will go into greater depth on this.
-john
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Video: The History of Espresso Machines (quickly summarized)
From the first espresso machines to today, the "recipe" for how they do their magic has been a combination of temperature, pressure, and water flow rate over time. In this video, we use the Decent to show you the "recipe inside the machine" from famous and important machines from espresso's past.
This is a deliberately simplified, whirlwind tour of the history of espresso machines, from my perspective. I show photos of important machines from history, that were typical of that stage.
My version of espresso's history is overwhelming about Lever machines, a brief E61 mention, pressure profilers like the Bianca and Rocket R9, and then Slayer, who were the first to suggest a radically different view on espresso extraction, finally addressing the different needs of light roasts.
Many thanks to Claudio and Simone of The Lever https://thelevermag.com/ magazine, who greatly aided me through lever machine history in the making of this video. I'm currently working with them on an article-length version of this historical view for their magazine, which I really wish were called "Be-Lever magazine".
-john
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A new way to make filter coffee: Filter 2.0 profile by Scott Rao
Scott Rao has today announced a new, automated way to make filter coffee, by using the Decent Espresso Machine:
https://www.scottrao.com/blog/2021/9...t-coffee-shots
This new profile is now in the nightly de1app, or you can download it and put it on your Android tablet via USB, in the /sdcard/de1plus/profiles/ directory.
The profile is described like this in the de1app:
"A new technique developed by Scott Rao, for making filter coffee with an espresso machine and 24g basket. The process: (1) insert two micron 55mm paper filter into the bottom of a clean portafilter basket. (2) Rinser the filter and basket with hot water. (3) Fill the basket with 20g to 22g of finely ground coffee, not quite espresso grind, but far finer than any filter grind. (4) WDT the grounds. (5) tamping is optional. (6) Place a metal mesh filter on top. (7) Lock in the portafilter and make the espresso to a 5:1 ratio. (8) Dilute with 225g—250g of water."
On the phone with me today, Scott described this as "the only automated filter coffee approach he's willing to drink" and a "9 out of 10".
You'll need a 24g basket, a mesh screen (such as bplus https://www.bplus.biz/products/lower...en-puck-screen or Flair 58 https://flairespresso.com/product/flair-58-puck-screen/)
This new coffee making approach is fairly straightforward on a Decent, but you can also make it with a manual lever machine, such as the Flair, if you use a bluetooth scale and an app to track the flow rate for the extraction phase. Both Acaia Scales and Decent Scales https://decentespresso.com/scale will work for tracking flow rate, and maybe other scales too. If you don't track the flow rate at the end, Scott tells me that a too-fast flow rate will likely result, and the result is very unpleasant. A 3ml/s extraction really is needed.
Looking forward to hearing from your results with this.
-john
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Scott answered my whatsapp just now, and wrote:
"I cut my own filters. But the easiest thing people can get that will work well is 55mm whatman #5 filters from Amazon" -
Followup from Scott Rao:
Whatman 1005-055 Qualitative Filter Paper Circles, 2.5 Micron, 94 s/100mL/sq inch Flow Rate, Grade 5, 55mm Diameter (Pack of 100)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00394F9V4...8WF869EFW39G3C
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Just wowComment
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There's a very active "modder" community around Decent, especially folks sharing 3D models that they can then 3D print.
That's a paddle that someone posted recently, that you can 3D print (or have printed for you).
As to the tablet, you can use the DE1 w/o a tablet, just by using the group head controls. I'd guess the tablet is on the desk nearby.
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Lagom grinders here at Decent HQ
I've been friendly for quite a while with the Hayden and Sam at "Option-O" https://www.instagram.com/option_o.coffee/ who make the Lagom grinders. During their R&D phase, they bought a DE1 to test with, and then bought more machines from afterwards as they improved their models.
That certainly got my attention!
I know that our espresso machine's charts are extremely useful to grinder and burr makers. SSP, the Korean super-burr designer/maker uses a Decent. A few years ago, a I visited Baratza with a DE1, and we were able to find problems in the direct distribution of grounds, of a grinder that was still in R&D, a problem that wasn't present when dosing through a cup. There's an Italian, and also a German grinder company, who also use Decents in their R&D.
Before the Niche arrived in the scene, poor quality grinders were the #1 cause of new-customer unhappiness with a DE1. Grinders under $1000 largely didn't produce coffee grounds of a high enough quality for the Decent, until the Niche arrived.
So, why I am interested in Lagom grinders?
The Niche is a conical burr grinder, which does produce very small "fines" in the mix of its coffee grinds. Those fines help the puck retain integrity, like mixing sand with gravel to make concrete.
This mix of particle sizes prevent channeling, which is a good thing. However, those fines tend to over-extract, and also the cloud the drink, leading to less clarity and less sweetness. With a light roast, those problems are something you want to solve, whereas you can usually live with them with medium-light to darker roasts.
A 64mm flat burr grinder is also a good choice, but there have been very few to choose from that don't have a huge hopper on top. The Decent Grinder that we used to sell, was essentially a Mazzer Super Jolly, modified by us with a built in scale. I decided to make that grinder, 6 years ago, because I could sell it well under $1000 and it made acceptable coffee with the Decent. 64mm burrs do a good job with medium to dark beans.
However, the hopper and horizontal path that grinds have to travel in that traditional "hopper grinder" design, make that style grinder not a great choice for home use. It's too big, causes clumping, and mixes stale beans in. Single dosing grinders solve those issues.
That's why I think the Lagom P64 https://www.option-o.com/lagom-p64 with its 64mm flat burrs, is also a good general purpose grinder, perfectly suitable for medium light beans, and darker. It's single dosing, with a straight grinds path, so it avoids causing clumping and holding stale grinds.
But what I was really excited about is their P100 grinder https://www.option-o.com/lagom-p100 with its massive 98mm flat burr set. Large flat burrs tend to give even particle size, with very little fines.
I love the offset-cylinder design, which pairs visually nicely with our black DE1 espresso machines.
More importantly, after a week using the P100, Paul and I are finding that our drink quality has been noticeably improved, especially with light roasts. Surprisingly, we've not been suffering huge pressure crashes like we expected from a big flat burr set, but that's partially because the Decent profiles we use today are much more tuned to preserve puck integrity, than what we had several years ago.
The Lagom P100 has an interesting feature, where the grind happens at one constant speed, and once the coffee beans are fully ground, the burrs speed up a LOT for a few seconds, which blows out the retained grounds in 2 seconds. It's a nice solution, automated and less ugly than the "air pump" bellows that I've seen on the Ultra grinder.
The P64 sells for USD$1585 while the P100 sells for USD$2650.
The Lagom folks tell me that they've got a mounting bracket, which is quite interesting to me as I have been trying to find a not-too-large, light-roast-friend grinder for our coffee carts. Being able to bolt the P100 down will make it much more travel friendly. Apparently, a twist-off motion can free the grinder, when you do want to remove it from the cart. Looking forward to testing that.
A few months ago, I published my "Adaptive Profile", which uses a constant flow extraction phase, that automatically calibrates, for each shot, at whatever flow was occuring at peak pressure. That profile has been working well with the medium light roasted beans, but not so well with light roasts on big flat burrs, where the pressure crashes. I haven't had a big-burr grinder here, so I haven't been able to address that deficiency. Over the next few months, I plan to try to find a way to have constant-flow extraction with light roasts and big burrs, at the end of an espresso, but without the downsides. I don't know if I'll figure it out, but now at least I can try!
-john
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Henry Hardy posted the message above on our owner's forum, and a few people added their emoticons to agree with it.
I wanted to share with you what happens here at Decent HQ when a machine comes in for repair. A whole bunch of people get involved, there's a lot of process and transparency. 1 to 2 day turnaround from arrival-to-shipping-back is typical. We've got a pretty well oiled repair machine here.
We're happy to share our internal repair conversation with anyone who has a machine repaired with us, if you're curious to see what was done.
This is a machine that came in for repair, from Dennis Brekke Dennis, who kindly also included a bag of roasted beans for us to try. Pictures from the 12 pages of internal workflow/conversation are on the bottom of the photo above.
-john
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Hey guys, anyone here tried Rao's Filter 2.0 profile? I updated my app but can't see the new profile. Is it the profile under a different name?Comment
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The new v1.43 Decent tablet stand
In August, we started to make a new version of the Decent Espresso Machine, numbered v1.43. All our XL/XXL models are now in stock with this.
We still had about 200 machines of v1.42 DE1PRO to build, which is why this newer version wasn't immediately available in the DE1PRO model.
Yesterday, I change the "choose a model" page https://decentespresso.com/model to let you choose v1.42 or v1.43, and wrote up a page about the difference. The only change is the tablet stand, and this video shows how it works.
If you're indifferent to the tablet stand improvement improvement, you can save USD $100 by buying the v1.42 model now.
I've started taking pre-orders now for the DE1PRO v1.43, and they'll ship toward the end of November.
We've been working extra hard since July to build up stock of machines for the Christmas season. At the moment, we have stock of all Decent models.
The barrage of news about chip and parts shortages has spooked me, and we've been investing virtually all our profits into building up stock of parts. We're paying a premium, of course, but that's much better than risking "factory slowed down or closed", which surprisingly many companies are having to do.
-john
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A big thank you to New York/Israel interior design studio 𝐊𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐍𝐢𝐯 𝐓𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐨 https://www.instagram.com/kerennivtoledano/ for including our espresso machine in this home, and having it featured in a TV show which shows this house.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CUAJC6zoDgF/Comment
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Preparing for the coming Supply Chain Apocalypse
Each day, I read yet another story about groceries stores with empty shelves, factories closing., high tech items unavailable. I don't think it's all "FUD", because our suppliers are giving us vague delivery estimates of "6 months to a year" for things that used to be 60 days. We bought the last 1000 Android tablets our supplier has, as they told me "we don't know when we're building more, as we don't have a firm delivery date from the chip vendor".
This is a bit worrisome. I don't know if this is a ploy to get people to stock-up-now, or if there's a genuine crisis. Or if the crisis is being caused by panic-induced hoarding.
We've always received "how long to wait after I pay?" messages, even though our website indicates "in stock" or the estimated wait times. But we're getting that question more often now.
I asked some of the people asking us this, if they'd see the "in stock" message on our website,? The reply was "lots of websites say that: they take your order and then you find out later it isn't in stock and have to get a refund".
So, to battle the perception that "is it really, really in stock?", as of today we're putting our audited inventory levels on the website itself, on every item that we track.
Some low cost items (screws, gaskets) we don't keep counts of, but most everything else, we do. For bundles of items (and assemblies), the "in stock" number is the quantity of the low-question part needed to make that bundle.
And by "audited" I really mean it. The HK government sends and auditor here at least yearly (it's been every 6 months recently) and the inventory they find has to really closely manage our books, or we get fined.
We use Quickbooks Online here at Decent, and their programmer's API is really fantastic. I've written software to nightly import customers and invoices into. I then pulling the new stock levels from the books, which make their way back into the website via a static "JSON" file of our entire product catalog. Our product database is available publicly at https://decentespresso.com/js/data/decent_products.js in case anyone wants to write an app that uses it.
Everyone in manufacturing is saying that 2022 will be "challenging". To prepare for that, we're buying 18 months of parts, far more than the recommended 6 months. Prices are high now, but they're not insane. I've seen 60x increases at times on things that are really unavailable otherwise, and I'd like to avoid being in that position. We're looking at renting another warehouse to store the extra parts stock.
Hopefully, telling people exactly how many items we really have here, will help them believe that their purchase really will be shipped right away.
-john
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Emmy's Decent Cartoon
Emirates-based cartoonist Emmy owns one of our Decent Espresso Machines. She's a coffee fan https://www.instagram.com/stories/hi...5608133013157/ and we're big fans of her cartoon series, which you can find at https://www.instagram.com/emmy.art/
In her cartoons, she explores Arab life from a woman's perspective: romance, relationships, children, pregnancy, couple's dynamics (in good times and bad). Besides being just plain fun, it offers the rest of us a view into Arab life that few of us know.
My only request, Emmy, can you put English subtitles in your Instagram posts, so that the rest of us can follow along?
On her website https://emmy.ae/ she sells a variety of products integrated with her art. I absolutely love her cup collection, which are adorable and fun, and definitely liven up the morning brew.
Find more of these cups at https://emmy.ae/collections/winter-collection
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Yesterday, the de1app (the Android app that talks to our espresso machine) got a new screen saver, drawn by Emmy herself. You can get Emmy's screen saver by choosing "nightly" and clicking "update". In a few months, it'll be in the "stable" app that everyone uses.
You can see it at the top of the photo above. It's chosen by the app automatically, among the Decent artwork that I commissioned years ago.
This is the first donated piece of art on the de1app, and I'm hoping it motivates other Decent owners with an artistic bent, to consider joining Emmy on the 5000 Android tablets making Decent espressos each day.
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Next month, we'll receive a large format, variable power, laser etching machine that we bought. One goal with it is to work with artists to etch their designs on the Decent itself. We can't do color, but we can do levels of gray. Here are sample etches the company did for us, on our black (and white) main covers, to show what it's capable of.
I think that line art, with swathes of color, will work best. I'm hoping we can sneak into Emmy's busy schedule to work together on this.
-john
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Accounting is like physics, or ... how Decent can be so ambitious
I find deep accounting questions super interesting, because for me, accounting is like physics: a math/numerical simplification of reality, which makes insights possible.
If that viewpoint sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend this book, which argues that European history is largely a product of the history of accounting in those countries:
https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Fin.../dp/0465031528
"The Reckoning" argues that the history of European nations can be read through their accounting practice. Well run, trusted government accounts meant lower interest rates to fuel war, and the countries with worse accounting lost those wars, as money to fight the war was less available to them. Accounting helped empires decide when they had expanded too much. In other places, accounting gave us freedom from Kings, with merchant states like Venice being able to replace a Monarch with a system that everyone has to follow, where trust and equality is. A dictatorship of transparency, you might say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Soll
It's a bit of tragedy that accounting has been now turned into a tool of government taxation, so that it's now associated with something quite negative. In some countries, like the USA, the entire field of accounting appears to see itself as purely a cost center of legal compliance, with nothing positive to say about how a company should act.
At Decent, we are trying to do a lot. Not only reinventing espresso machines, actually making them ourselves, as well as creating a full suite of coffee accessories. I don't know of any other company, except for Weber Workshops https://weberworkshops.com/ with so ambitious a plan.
To pull this off, we have to simplify the otherwise complexity of our ambitions. That's what accounting means to us. If we do it right, we can answer real questions like: should we design our own grinder (no!) ? Launch our website in a new language, and hire support people who can speak it (maybe)? Set up a repair shop in a country? (usually, no) What price should we charge, so that customers can still afford to buy form us, but we make enough profit, that the risk of total loss is worth it.
Because Decent is owned by its Bugs and I, and not outside investors, these questions are very real. It's our money. We only get one shot at at this. Screw up, we go bust.
Accounting for an espresso machine
Getting into the gritty details, we have 280 parts that go into a DE1. We need to make sure we don't order too late, but each part has its own lead time, and it's always shifting. Order too early and you need to store more parts, and the money is now tied up, and can't be used for other things. Every part has its own failure rate, and that has to be taken into account too. Screw up, and the factory stops. In six years: that's happened twice. It hurts.
A friend of ours who worked at Tesla told me that they only have an imprecise idea of how much each car costs to make. That's fine, when you have the kind of cash they have, and the ability (and desire) to borrow lots more money.
For those interested in manufacturing accounting, let me explain a bit how we track the inventory and cost of parts that go into our espresso machine:- In Quickbooks, the way we track machines changed with v1.43. I don't have visibility in our accounts, of how many machines we have, for machines before v1.43. But that wasn't a problem, because in the past, every machine we built was pre-sold, We never had any inventory of DE1, and demand outstripped supply.
- This year, with v1.43, we now can build machines faster than they're ordered. To track our building and costs, we created an "internal customer" who buys the parts from us, and then returns a finished machine. That allows us to know how many finished machines we have, and what each machine cost us to make.
- With all our earlier models, in Quickbooks we list all the parts the person received as if they'd bought parts (and not a machine), and then discount the entire thing to reach the amount they paid
- That previous accounting method let us track our parts inventory, but it made for very large invoices for each customer, making Quickbooks slow.
- With v1.43 every batch of machines is "sold" to the "decent factory" customer. My program imports the invoice into Quickbooks, then fetches the journal entries that show me the actual this-very-moment first-in-first out current cost of every part. I then update the invoice to reflect today's parts prices.
- With v1.43 we're now able to exactly know what it costs us to build a machine, on that day. The total price changes daily as we consume parts from different supplier orders.
To put a picture to it, here is an example of a Quickbooks invoice to a customer, for a v1.42 DE1XL. All the parts are listed on the invoice, as if the person had bought the parts from us, and not a machine.
We now are able to make machines faster than we sell them (finally!) and so we immediately sell parts to ourselves, and return a finished machine. That puts espresso machines into quickbooks' inventory, which I can then suck out via the quickbooks API and present to our customers on our website. Here are 25 machines of one model, being made:
Note that all this Quickbooks stuff is created automatically by software I've written, which syncs the website database of purchases, with quickbooks. We have no manual data entry here, of any customer orders, payments, returns, refunds, etc. Everything goes automatically into quickbooks via their APIs, with programs I've written.
Yes, this represents a massive amount of programming, but it means that we can keep things running smoothly here. Manufacturing complex objects isn't easy.
And all this homework means we can be bold, when we decide to act. We've simplified reality, which was the original goal of accounting, and it has its benefits.
-john
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My heads hurts.
Thankfully, due to my incapacity to handle the mind boggling level of complexity you have just outlined, my business deals in Web based services so inventory is not a thing, as such. Yes we still need to make decisions on numbers, for sure, but we always have "stock".
Still, I look on with what is probably foolish envy, at those who design, engineer, manufacture and distribute a physical item that brings such satisfaction into the lives of so many.
Not for me, but more power to you John. -
ha tompoland I used to only have have "virtual goods" businesses, but I wanted to "make something real", and I definitely bit off more than I thought I would.
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"Insight Dark" - new skin for the de1app
Decent customer Martin Reuben and Alex Roys have completed the Photoshop work for a Dark Mode version of the Insight Skin, and I've finished programming it.
It's now available in the 'nightly' version of the de1app, and can be selected on the settings->app->skins page:
As the "dark skins" (DSX, Metric, SWDark) are all quite popular, I expect that Insight Dark will be as well.
Note that I have not made "Dark Mode" versions of the "Settings" section, as those pages (especially the shot editors) are still actively being changed, and it's a lot of work to keep two versions in sync of the same gui. When you go to "Settings" you'll be back to the usual color scheme.
I'm also continuing to work with Dennis Brekke on a mobile-phone (in portrait mode) version of the de1app and Insight Skin. There's good progress there, but that's a lot more programming work too, once the photoshop work is done.
-john
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Wondering if anyone has tried the filter 2.0 just using Aeropress papers and results. I haven't ordered mesh screen yet, wondering if its 100% necessary.Comment
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