Announcement

**>decentespresso** · 16 March 2022, 01:33 PM

New shopping cart feature: how fast is shipping?

When people add accessories or a DE1 to their cart, there is now a link to six-month real delivery times to their country.

The footer on that page explains:

"Our delivery time calculation starts from when we box each order until the courier tells us it was delivered. This includes time needed for local pickup and customs clearance. We box all orders each morning at 8 AM, Hong Kong time zone, from Monday to Friday. Current time in Hong Kong: Wednesday, 8:55 AM"

I hope that the monday-friday, 8am explanation above is clear, and helps to answer common questions people have.

The Cart page no longer shows the courier's estimate of "Days" as that was partially a lie from them to get you to pay for more expensive shipping options.

You can also change the recency of the analysis, for instance to just see the past 30 days. You also can see how many packages we've sent to your country, for any given time period.

For a good example of this information for your country, see:
https://decentespresso.com/c?s=477+1+409+1

then:

Click on the link next to the DE1:
[view a chart of espresso machine shipping times]

and also

Click on the link next to the shipping option:
[view a chart of coffee accessory shipping times]

This feature has taken quite a long time for me to program, as I'm pulling real delivery tracking directly from the API of each courier we use, for every single package we've ever sent. There's no marketing fluff here, this is real data.

To my knowledge, this is the first time a company has been totally transparent about what its shipping, giving real data, for every courier and every country. If you know of another company doing this, I'd love to know about it, to see how they present this information.

-john

**>decentespresso** · 17 March 2022, 06:45 AM

New IKEA BROR coffee cart options

IKEA seems to be expanding the options on the BROR line, which is good news, since we're making and selling modifications for their tables.

We sell precut-for-coffee-cart tops for both sizes of BROR, more-robust wheel adaptors, and long bolts for wrapping the cart in your foamboard signage.

There's now white versions of the smaller and bigger BROR carts, as well as a closed cabinet version of the smaller bror.

More info about the Decent Coffee Cart at
https://decentespresso.com/coffeecart

and some of the new IKEA BROR stuff:
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/bror-ca...ood-s49275286/
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/bror-table-white-80452620/
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/bror-ut...hite-00452619/

-john

**>decentespresso** · 18 March 2022, 06:53 AM

Improving the humble Espresso Gasket

One of the few parts that wears out on an all espresso machines, is the rubber gasket that forms a seal between the group head and your portafilter.

We've been working on how to improve "life with a gasket" from every angle we could think of.

REMOVING: Firstly, there's "how to remove the gasket". We're trialing various tools, with the intention of including that tool for free, along with any gasket we send you. So far, this double-ended one in the photo is our favorite. And in our latest gasket design, we've added a notch on the inside ring, to slide that tool into. There's also a light chamfer at the edges, to help you slide that tool in.

MATERIAL: A lot of people in the Home Barista community prefer silicone rubber gaskets, instead of traditional ones. However, when making design choices for the v1.0 DE1, I was concerned that we were already "way too innovative" for a lot of people's comfort zone, and I worried that an unfamiliar "locking feel" to the portafilter would freak some people out. Sort of how people judge a car by how the driver side door closes. So: I decided to use MBR rubber, as that is what I found as the material used in virtually all professional Italian espresso machines. Now, 7 years into making our machines, I feel that our audience can now deal with a bit more unfamiliar-but-better design choices from us. So, our new gaskets will made from silicone.

COLOR: gaskets fail for two reasons 1) coffee grinds mashed into them and 2) the rubber gets brittle. Our gaskets have been black, which is the only choice with MBR Rubber. Other vendors (such as Cafelat) use red or blue. In deciding what color to pick, I wanted something that wasn't garish, but from a functionality standpoint, I wanted a light color, that would clearly show coffee grounds stuck to it. That would make it much easier to help our customers, and see if their gasket leaking problem could simply resolved by removing the gasket and cleaning the coffee grounds off. And so, our new gaskets will be a light grey color.

FREE: we're still a few months from getting these into production (and getting the removal tool, too) but once we do, the gasket and removal tool will be available for free, on demand, to DE1 owners, as part of any other purchase they make with us. And new machines we make will transition to this new design as well.

For those without a DE1, these are 8.5mm, 58mm gaskets, and should work on other machines that use those standards as well. However, we're not in the gasket business, so ours will continue to be more expensive than Cafelat's excellent gaskets. Plus we don't use resellers like Cafelat does, so shipping will likely be more expensive. Cafelat's gaskets are likely available in your country from a reseller. Thus... I don't really recommend this gasket for non-DE1 owners.

Because we're a small company (50 people) and still have a fairly new product (7 years old) we tend to order parts in short runs, and each time we re-order, we look to see if there are ways to further improve it.

If you have thoughts on how to improve the humble gasket, please share them!

-john

**tompoland** · 19 March 2022, 03:47 PM

Whoa decentespresso I never had you figured to be colorist ! Bright green: cos I like it? Also easy to spot dark colors on it. That's one of the reasons I have a white Decent. And it's not like we see it much.

**>decentespresso** · 23 March 2022, 06:06 AM

Decent customer Edward Lelchitsky shared this video today of his coffee cart.

He built it using the low cost "bigger" BROR table from IKEA, modified with the replacement top that we make, which is precut to accept a DE1, knockbox and pitcher rinser. A pump for the DE1 and the rinser are mounted upside down to the bottom side of the wood top. Two water containers (one clean water, one for dirty water) finish up the project.

The slightly larger tablet that he chose allows him to put two grinders on it, and still have space for a tamping mat.

I've put a few years of my life into designing and optimizing this little project. We stay out of the furniture business, because IKEA does that so well, but then take over to help you convert it into a coffee cart.

There's a long informational video I made, showing how to make the cart, as well as all the bits you might need.
https://decentespresso.com/coffeecart

Besides feeling a sense of accomplishment at making your own cart, the design I chose tries to strike a balance between a polished appearance, and giving you flexibility to modify the cart to your preferences.

-john

**>decentespresso** · 24 March 2022, 10:23 AM

Decent Collab with Blue Willow Tea

Tomorrow, I'm spending the day with Ali, the force behind the impressive Blue Willow Tea: https://www.bluewillowtea.com/collections/shop-all

They're a direct-from-the-source tea importer, only do loose leaf teas, and they give temperature and brew instructions with each tea they sell.

I'm working with Ali to try to optimize the Decent tea portafilter recipes, to work best with her teas.

They have a tea shop in Berkeley, California (behind Tokyo Fish Market) and I've been exceedingly impressed by the quality of their teas, and the seriousness of their commitment to source, technique, and history.

The recipes I've made for the DE1, using the tea portafilter, are my attempt to follow the gongfu technique, of several short infusions with small amounts of water. Except that with the DE1, 4 infusions are made, and blended together into a single 200ml serving.

I'll report back soon, on how the collaboration is going.

My goal is to work with Ali to make recipes that take advantage of the DE1s strengths, namely accurate temperature control (each brew can be different), timing and repeatability. Since she has a serious import/mail order business established, those of you wanting to recreate what we're drinking, can order from her, and then use the recipes we collaborated on.

I also really like how they have a very, very strong foundation in traditional teas, especially Chinese. They also have tisanes, but don't venture off into the "soda pop" style of brews that you see in supermarkets. My British girlfriend has been an English Breakfast person her whole life, but has been converted to the "Simmer Down" blend of chamomile, lemon balm, ginger, lavender and sage.

This is serious stuff.

-john

**>decentespresso** · 24 March 2022, 12:09 PM

Decent reorganizes forum access, searching and docs

I've today completed a new section "tech support" page for DE1 customers, which now:

Tap your name on the top bar of the Decent website, and you're automatically logged in to the new support site.
- when you bought from us, we gave you a cookie to make this happen automagically.
- you can logout of support, if you want your browser to be forgotten.
you can now join the "famous" Diaspora Forum, on your own, immediately after paying.
- Instructions are also given on how to turn off email notifications <grin> as the forum can be VERY active.
- We also automatically recognize used machines that were resold
  - The new owner writes to us at https://decentespresso.com/contact
  - We'll confirm the sale with the previous owner and transfer the serial number and all rights, to the new owner.
give you direct links to search
- You can now search each of these separately.
- Searching Diaspora has been improved.
  - So much has been discussed, over 7 years, that it's often been difficult to find the relevant historical message for your question.
  - As of today, by default, now only the "first post" on a topic is searched. Comments are not searched for your keywords.
    - This first post is usually the "anchor" for the conversation, and contains most of the valid keywords. It's also what people are generally looking for. People are usually *not* looking for their keywords to appear in one of the comments.
      - But you can also search only the comments, or both, at once.
      - I'm finding search results to be much more useful now that I'm restricting the search only the first post in a topic. Before, too many not-useful results were returned.
  - The FAQ and both books are now separately searchable, with dedicated pages for that.
    - You can add your own questions to the FAQ. My staff will answer you and organize your question into a findable category.
A button to create a "I have a problem
- This creates a message in our "Problems" subforum of Diaspora, where my staff and other owners, will come to your help.
The "5. Maintenance & Cleaning" section of the manual has been extensively rewritten, reworked, by Shin, Dennis and Mirjam. This has been the weakest part of our documentation, subject to a lot of complaints, but I think it's getting better.

-john

**>decentespresso** · 26 March 2022, 05:00 AM

Mood boosting March at Decent Espresso

A big THANK YOU to the 39 Decent customers who have bought my staff cake:
https://decentespresso.com/c?filter=cake

Because COVID is raging in Hong Kong, as many as 2/3rds of our staff has been out of the office at time. Some are in quarantine, others with COVID. About half are in the office now, just those dedicated to machine building and boxing orders. All the computer-task jobs are being doing at home. Estimates are that about half of Hong Kongers have contracted COVID now. But the worst seems to be over, and we're in the downward curve, with things projected to be "normal" and the end of April.

To thank those who are putting the extra effort to come to Decent HQ in person, we've asked our chef to make "extra special" meals at lunchtime for everyone.

And on Fridays, everyone at the office gets a personal-sized cake with a note.

Of course, without the customer donations of cake, we'd still be doing this, but the gifts from customers make the gesture extra-meaningful. It's not just the bosses who appreciate them, but those who benefit from Decent stuff.

-john

**>decentespresso** · 26 March 2022, 05:30 AM

Two new tea profiles, for Blue Willow oolong and sencha

I spent yesterday with Ali, the owner of tea importer Blue Willow Tea https://bluewillowtea.com/

We tried 4 different teas, making them 3 different ways:

with a French press and a temperature controlled kettle
gongfu style, with a small ceramic vessel, and 4 separate short infusions
with the DE1 tea recipe, which mixes 4 separate short infusions together into a single mug

The "mind-blowing" result (according to Ali) was the (Taiwanese) Black Honey Oolong on the DE1, at 94C, which produced a 10oz/300ml cup that closely matched the second infusion made by hand, with the gongfu technique. The second infusion is considered the best, and the fact that the Decent made an entire mug that tasted like that, was totally unexpected.

The Tsuyuhikari Sencha was more difficult to brew well on the Decent, but we think we cracked the code. The temperature was brought down to 140ºF/60ºC, and only 3 infusions were used. The 4th infusion tasted over-extracted and so we discarded it. The end result was a cup that tasted very close to the french press, 3 minute brew at 150ºF/65ºC, which we liked best.

Both these recipes are now available in the NIGHTLY version of the de1app but Decent owners can also download the profiles from the Diaspora posting, and put them in their tablets' /sdcard/de1plus/profiles/ directory.

Ali tells me that the Sencha is sadly out of stock online (a small number remain available in-stock) as she buys direct-from-the-farm and last year's harvest is done. However, current season Sencha deliveries will start next month. The Black Honey Oolong is happily in stock, and I really recommend you try it, if you like tea and own a Decent.

-john

**>decentespresso** · 27 March 2022, 05:02 AM

Solid black resin handles for black DE1?

Just received these photos from a new supplier, of solid-black-resin handles that we're doing a sample run of.

The photos, to me, look really nice. What do you think?

These are not moulded, so there's no seam or parting line. These are made like our wood ones are, on a lathe.

I've been looking at replacing the painted-black wood handles, for black DE1 machines, with something solid-black. The reason, is that:

small scratches or "dings" are fairly visible with the painted surface, and the wood is a bit soft (for example, complaints about the portafilter stand damaging these)
banging the black painted wood handles on a knockbar can cause paint damage
water ingress on the wood can cause paint to flake off the top, near the head
La Marzocco, for instance, uses a heavy rubber for their handles. Much more heavy duty than our wood approach.

We'd tried to find ebony, or a chemically treated wood to make it black, but both are not doable. Ebony is unobtainable in large quantities (too expensive) and the chemical blackening doesn't look good.

We made samples of various resin effects, and the resin mix (black/grey, bottom photos) was a candidate:

The white DE1 machines don't have this same issue that black painted ones do, as they're a lightly varnished natural wood color, so that dings/scratches are not especially visible.

In a few weeks, I'll have the solid resin handles in front of me.

The original DE1 handle prototype from 7 years ago, was made of resin, so I know how it feels. Solid, heavy, and dense. It didn't feel like "cheap plastic" at all. Hopefully these will feel similarly.

Do you have any thoughts on this?

Currently the black wood handles are one of the only parts of the DE1 that show any age with use (the other major one is with some Android tablets having swelling batteries or air bubbles). I'd like DE1 to look as brand-new with age as possible. The tablet issue should get solved in a few weeks, with a firmware upgrade we're doing, but the black handles still need to be resolved.

So, I'm thinking of changing our handles to NEVER be "painted", but to show their natural color, ie:

black resin (either solid black, or with some grey mixed in)
oak wood
reclaimed Italian olive wood (optional accessory)

I'm also trying to decide between the solid-black and black/grey mix.

Feedback very much sought...

-john

**JMcCee** · 27 March 2022, 12:43 PM

Much nicer. I'd replace my wooden ones with these in a flash.

**>decentespresso** · 29 March 2022, 07:45 AM

The most Decent Cities in the World

Ben and I are working on an updated world map of the locations of DE1 worldwide.

There are now 6000 Decents worldwide, which is more locations than Google Maps can normally handle. The last time we updated the map was December 2018, and Google "barfed" quite a bit at my data, back then.

A big surprise is having Singapore be #1. It's a serious coffee town, and a neighbor, so that's really cool.

Seattle, San Francisco and Austin all make sense, as coffee and tech are both big there. And then you get to the world meta cities (New York, Shanghai, London....)

I should mention that we have poor visibility into the cities in the Arab world that have Decents, as 255 DE1 were listed as going to the Hong Kong address of Aramex, to be forwarded on.

If you'd like to have a try at creating a map from this data, I've made the CSV available here: http://magnatune.com/p/city_locations_of_de1.csv - You'll need to combine alternative spellings of some cities (ie, Wien/Vienna) to get correct sums. And some addresses have non western spelling, and Excel corrupts that, so stay out of excel if you can. LibreOffice handles the non-Western characters correctly.

Here's the top 50:

| count | city | country
| 100 | Singapore | SG
| 87 | Seattle | US
| 74 | San Francisco | US
| 63 | Austin | US
| 59 | New York | US
| 57 | Shanghai | CN
| 55 | London | UK
| 51 | Brooklyn | US
| 47 | Los Angeles | US
| 46 | Hong Kong | CN
| 41 | Beijing | CN
| 36 | San Diego | US
| 34 | Chicago | US
| 33 | Seoul | KR
| 32 | Munchen | DE
| 32 | Berlin | DE
| 31 | Portland | US
| 28 | San Jose | US
| 26 | Zurich | CH
| 26 | Toronto | CA
| 19 | Vienna | AT
| 19 | Dallas | US
| 18 | Washington | US
| 18 | Oakland | US
| 18 | Houston | US
| 17 | Atlanta | US
| 17 | Chengdu | CN
| 17 | Suzhou | CN
| 16 | Cambridge | US
| 16 | San Antonio | US
| 16 | Shenzhen | CN
| 15 | Miami | US
| 14 | Bellevue | US
| 14 | Taipei | TW
| 14 | Pittsburgh | US
| 14 | Denver | US
| 14 | Munich | DE
| 14 | Hamburg | DE
| 13 | Palo Alto | US
| 13 | Orlando | US
| 13 | Mountain View | US
| 13 | Long Island City | US
| 13 | Las Vegas | US
| 12 | Jersey City | US
| 12 | Vancouver | CA
| 12 | Arlington | US
| 11 | Charlotte | US
| 11 | Albany | US
| 11 | Calgary | CA
| 11 | Bangkok | TH

**>decentespresso** · 30 March 2022, 07:46 AM

Ben today made an internal-only use map showing exact location of every customer. That's too detailed :-D to share the URL with you, but I can share images here, so you can get a much better idea of where Decents go. If there's a region you're curious about, leave a comment, I'll take a picture.

gc · 30 March 2022, 05:04 PM

Lonely up here in Cairns! I was an early adopter too

**>decentespresso** · 31 March 2022, 12:26 PM

Most Decent Countries

After cleaning up the address data (mostly, different spellings) here is a current list of what countries have Decent Espresso Machines, and how many. Note that while Hong Kong is not a country, it is split out separately here in this report, because most of those machines are forwarded onto the Middle East.

It's interesting to note that except for Singapore and Canada, all the countries in the top 10 have online coffee forums that we are very active in. I do think that Decent's participation on forums is part of our success. But I also think there's a different correlation at work, namely that countries that buy a lot of Decents, are also the same countries that have active coffee-related online forums, simply because they're the same group of people.

Countries with online coffee forums we participate in: USA (HB), the Arab world (Telegram), Australia (Coffee Geek), China (Wechat), South Korea, UK (CFUK, Germany/Switzerland/Austria (Kaffee Netz). If you'd like to participate in your countries' forum and don't know how to join, please ask me. There are other coffee forums (for example, Israel, Japan) that talk about Decent, but we're not actively part of those discussions.

The US is almost half our sales, followed by MENA countries, China, Germany, South Korea, UK, Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Singapore. Though the US is our anchor, we do really work at supporting the rest of the world, as that's more-than-half our sales, and also a wise strategy for stability in such an unstable world.

The source data is available here: http://magnatune.com/p/decent_countries.csv http://magnatune.com/p/decent_countries.xlsx

-john

Announcement

Decent Espresso Machines (DE1) - Any thoughts?

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment