The point about the newer Bialettis being cheaper is absolutely true. My mother has an old (>10 years) Moka that feels heavy and sturdy. A couple of years ago, after accidentally leaving it on the stove for too long, the bottom chamber and the filter basket got a permanent burnt coffee taste, and we bought a new one to replace it. That one was lighter and came with a significant thinner filter basket, which I also attributed to either being counterfeit or just they shipping cheaper versions of the product to Brazil.
Then, a couple of months ago, I was on vacation in Italy and decided to get a brand new one as a gift, directly from an official Bialetti store. To my surprise, the Mokas in the store felt exactly like the lower-quality one we had bought in Brazil. I didn't even buy the gift.
You see a similar thing with the glass chemex. There is a healthy market on eBay for pre-1980 models that were hand blown from great quality glass. My wife got me one for a gift and the difference in feel is remarkable. New ones feel fragile, this feels solid and strong. I’ve broken two of the newer versions and it’s dangerous. The old one is still standing strong in my house, surviving trips in my RV, and generally doing it’s job. I’m sure I sound like a curmudgeon but they don’t make stuff like they used to
James Hoffman gives a good history of Bialetti here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upgQsA5kLAk including their sale to Faema and later to a cookware manufacturer, their numerous brushes with bankruptcy, and the stiff competition they've gotten from... even in Italy... pod machines.
Bialetti has been on its last leg since 2015. They're drowning in debt and (in the best case scenario) are headed toward restructuring soon; in any case their future's not looking bright.
Such a cool idea, and attractive images. However I’m kind of disappointed they mostly picked things that are fairly simple, transparent or openable, and look exactly the way you’d expect them to inside. I assume some combination of cost & size drove this.
A vintage espresso machine with 1 group head would be more novel, for example.
Lumafield scanned a 1960s flip flop module for me, to help reverse engineer some vintage NASA hardware. The module contained a bunch of resistors, transistors, capacitors, and diodes, encased in a 13-pin plastic package. These modules had various functions and were used like integrated circuits, but made from discrete components in the pre-IC time. With the Lumafield scans, I could reverse-engineer the circuitry.
I actually enjoyed this one more, since it was used to point out measured tolerances and problems with manufacturing (voids, bubbles, untrimmed flash, shavings, etc).
And even that you essentially disassemble them and see how they work through using them. I suppose a lot of people only know or use one or two ways and may be completely unfamiliar with others though.
Interesting images and a very well put together page.
But a little off topic, I was struck by this:
> With the powerful 1200 W heating element
A typical European kettle is at least 1800 W, comfortably less than the power deliverable from a 10 A, 230 V circuit. A typical UK kettle would be more like 3000 W, such as this one (it seems that all the kettles on that website are 3 kW):
UK plug sockets are rated at 13 A, giving a maximum power rating of 2,990 W. Kettles are consequently amongst the highest-drawing household appliances in the UK.
Back when there were only three television channels, the National Grid planners used to pore over the Radio Times, looking for popular programmes like the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special (21 to 28 million viewers in 1977), so they could prepare for the demand surge of the entire nation putting the kettle on at the end of the programme.
I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make?
I'm sure you're aware that US sockets are 110-120V. The power required by a European kettle would too often trip someone's circuit breaker in the US, especially if any other equipment were also plugged in (you usually want to stick to max 1500 W on a circuit).
Clearly the "powerful 1200 W" is in the context of equipment designed for American residential sockets -- the page is produced by an American company after all.
(Which is why Americans don't use electric kettles nearly as much as Brits/Europeans, of course.)
I checked, across the pond (here in NL) most kettles are up to 2200, maybe 2400 W; the 3 kW ones are the "dispense instant boiling water" type things. I suspect the UK power standards are a bit more beefy, the plugs sure are.
It's probably a wide safety margin, you should be able to run an electric oven, a hob, and a kettle at the same time on a single fuse group nowadays. Or a kitchen should have separate groups.
CT is the wrong imaging tech for Moka pots at least - they're much cooler looking if you're doing neutron imaging and can see the water:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VESMU7JfVHU
Very cool, if you don't care about seeing the condensed steam this could be done with X-rays by adding Sodium metatungstate or very toxic thallium formate/malonate to the water. You could also probably replace the water with bormoform or if you don't care about destroying everything, elemental bromine.
>The aluminum is easily activated and directly after the experiment it often has something in the order of 300-400uSv/h. This decays to 4-5uSv/h in about 15-20min, some hours are needed to reach inactive status <0.1uSv/h. The coffee does not become active to a degree that is worth mentioning. However, due to the risk of contamination in the controlled zone it is not allowed to eat or drink things that have been in the beam.
> At times, Fourth Wave innovations verge into the realm of obsession, making you wonder how much real difference all of this precision makes to a cup of coffee. At the end (or beginning) of the day, coffee is a ritual. More than mere caffeine delivery, these technologies enable a multi-faceted sensory experience. Exploring the complexity of its flavors and aromas has transformed coffee from an article of consumption into an open-ended object of scientific and aesthetic experimentation.
There are certainly diminishing returns on many of the aspects coffee enthusiasts care about. But when I started experimenting with an Aeropress and some better coffee I found it interesting that there were many fundamental aspects I could easily taste. Temperature and grind settings can get very obvious quickly. And also the difference between roast levels or some kinds of coffee beans/preparation are not difficult to taste. And I don't trust myself to distinguish any of the more subtle tastes coffee enthusiasts talk about.
But once you e.g get into arguments on whether high-end grinders with conical or flat burrs are better you're far into the diminishing returns that might not survive a blind test.
Afaict Lumafield (the company behind this) sells b2b. Seems like a very non-egregious form of advertising. I think most likely the engineers that work on this are hobbiests. Perhaps they managed to convince C-suite to let them use part of the marketing budget but I find it hard to believe a company would pay $4.5k/month for their tech because of hype and a pretty website alone
> Removing used coffee immediately after brewing and storing the AeroPress with the seal pushed all the way through the chamber (as shown) can help minimize wear by reducing compression to extend the gasket’s life.
But, that's not what's shown. Pushing the gasket all the way through isn't possible unless the filter head is removed.
Yeah I personally store mine with the filter head on, and the plunger/gasket inner cylinder separate. Also other protip (which may actually be in the instructions), I pour the hot water onto the gasket before pushing it into the AeroPress, so the material expands and will have a tighter seal.
Proper storage is just pulling the plunger out entirely.
Every few years, soaking the rubber seal in mineral oil overnight then cleaning will restore flexibility (otherwise it shrinks over time, reducing the quality of the seal).
Unrelated: using paper filters is less eco-responsible than the gold foil filter, but makes for better coffee.
> "With the powerful 1200 W heating element (the thin coil wire), the kettle reaches optimal temperature very quickly — in under three minutes."
Europeans (and other countries with ~230V household sockets) would consider this quite poor performance for a kettle. 3000 W kettles are not uncommon here in the UK!
> ... Fellow is at the top of the gooseneck game with their Stagg EKG electric kettle line. Let’s see how they manage to achieve unmatched precision in temperature control ...
FWIW, I owned a Fellow, until it failed. Now happily replaced with an OXO kettle: 1500W; much better ergonomics, at least for those with larger hands; fewer steam burns; more readable temperature display.
I have this kettle, and its selling points are: temperature control, ergonomics, and the steady, controllable flow rate. Using it is pure joy!
It reaches the desired temperature before I'm done preparing everything else (throw the beans in the grinder, pre-heat the V60, etc), so it does not matter that it can't draw 3kW.
Related, but not as fancily presented, the startup I’m at just scanned a coffee bean in our micro-CT that we developed. It’s especially good for low-Z (like carbon and silicon) based samples in contrast to normal X-Rays that see right through it (think x-ray images of a broken arm where the tissue is invisible).
Just reading the headline I was like "why X-ray them? Couldn't they just take them apart to see what's inside". But clicking on the article made me go "Oh, I get it now. This is damn interesting and very informative."
Slight sidenote, but today I've reading about Dual-energy CT tech in airports [1], which will finally force airports to unban liquids above 100ml.
Some call the 2006 liquid explosive terror plot a failure, but it's been one of the most effective ever IMO. The economic and environmental effects [2] of the ban have been massive, likely resulting in thousands of lives lost.
[1] ECAC EDS C3
[2] At London's Heathrow Airport alone, approximately 2.2 tons of liquids, aerosols, and gels were confiscated every day in 2017.
A few days ago I accidentally put wife's beloved Bialetti Brikka pot in the dishwasher. The aluminium lost its anodized coating due to chemical reaction with the detergent (alkaline I think), and the pot turned dull/dark gray. Scrubbing the surface left some gray mark on fingers, which got me wonder if aluminium is actually safe for making coffee? Bialetti also sells stainless steel pots, and I wonder if they're safer to use.
For how much love went into the imaging and description of everything, the actual coffee knowledge is maddening.
You want your water in your Aeropress to be as close to boiling as possible if using lightly roasted beans (which I'd wager is most of Aeropress usage)! None of that 80-85 degree celsius nonsense.
Similarly, their description of ceramic burrs is bizarre. Ceramic burrs are not considered "better" than stainless steel ones! If you look into high-end grinders sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars (both commercial and "enthusiast" ones), they will all have stainless steel burrs!
And don't get me started on their description of conical vs flat burrs...
This has to be a marketing exercise by the CT machine maker, right?
"We spotted casting issues with the new pot"
"We can see the density difference in the plastic"
"We found aluminum shavings"
For the right audience, this would definitely sell one of those big fancy CT machines.
Not that I'm complaining -- visuals, presentation, content is all thoroughly interesting, speaking as someone with an Aeropress, a Moka. Pretty awesome piece.
> There’s also a hidden game in the Stagg EKG and Corvo EKG kettles. If you remove your kettle from the base and toggle the F/C switch back and forth, you’ll unlock a snake-like game called Wormy that you can play using the dial.
Funny, how I’m finding out about that from a CT scan of my kettle :)
They picked boring things to look at unfortunately. Not a lot going on in Moka pot that you can't grok just by looking at and taking it apart. Throwing a whole all-in-one countertop machine might be cooler.
I'd be interested in seeing a show of hands - who else generally dislikes webpages like this that use the scroll wheel to manipulate the zoom, rotation, or displayed content of an object (like a CAT scan or 3D phone model) or otherwise makes scroll behave unusually (e.g. the Opera GX website has a point where scrolling down makes a list of cards move sideways instead of actually scrolling down)?
To be clear, I like the content displayed here; it's just that the way they chose to move between views of the CAT scan are a little annoying to me.
Are there any advantages to the aluminium version of a moka pot aside from tradition/aesthetics?
I switched to one of the (Bialetti-made) stainless steel ones ("Venus" shape) because at one point I lived somewhere with an induction hob. I immaculately saw that the stainless version was considerably easier to clean. Cleaning, afterall, is half the job of using one of these.
Visually, I prefer the aluminium shape of course, but they are a real nightmare to keep clean and presumably you're drinking a lot of that aluminium oxide.
[+] [-] felipc|2 years ago|reply
Then, a couple of months ago, I was on vacation in Italy and decided to get a brand new one as a gift, directly from an official Bialetti store. To my surprise, the Mokas in the store felt exactly like the lower-quality one we had bought in Brazil. I didn't even buy the gift.
[+] [-] MarkMarine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rfrey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C-x_C-f|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingus9001|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totoglazer|2 years ago|reply
A vintage espresso machine with 1 group head would be more novel, for example.
[+] [-] kens|2 years ago|reply
My writeup: https://www.righto.com/2022/08/lumafield-flip-flop.html
[+] [-] jacobwilliamroy|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
[+] [-] amatecha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|2 years ago|reply
With clinical equipment you can image all sorts of things beautifully, but a hunk of brass won’t generate any useful images.
[+] [-] OJFord|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbrnh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|2 years ago|reply
But a little off topic, I was struck by this:
> With the powerful 1200 W heating element
A typical European kettle is at least 1800 W, comfortably less than the power deliverable from a 10 A, 230 V circuit. A typical UK kettle would be more like 3000 W, such as this one (it seems that all the kettles on that website are 3 kW):
https://www.argos.co.uk/product/9363195?clickPR=plp:1:72
[+] [-] cjs_ac|2 years ago|reply
Back when there were only three television channels, the National Grid planners used to pore over the Radio Times, looking for popular programmes like the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special (21 to 28 million viewers in 1977), so they could prepare for the demand surge of the entire nation putting the kettle on at the end of the programme.
[+] [-] crazygringo|2 years ago|reply
I'm sure you're aware that US sockets are 110-120V. The power required by a European kettle would too often trip someone's circuit breaker in the US, especially if any other equipment were also plugged in (you usually want to stick to max 1500 W on a circuit).
Clearly the "powerful 1200 W" is in the context of equipment designed for American residential sockets -- the page is produced by an American company after all.
(Which is why Americans don't use electric kettles nearly as much as Brits/Europeans, of course.)
[+] [-] cjrp|2 years ago|reply
That’s too long to wait for a brew.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
It's probably a wide safety margin, you should be able to run an electric oven, a hob, and a kettle at the same time on a single fuse group nowadays. Or a kitchen should have separate groups.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] msds|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s0rce|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbierwagen|2 years ago|reply
>The aluminum is easily activated and directly after the experiment it often has something in the order of 300-400uSv/h. This decays to 4-5uSv/h in about 15-20min, some hours are needed to reach inactive status <0.1uSv/h. The coffee does not become active to a degree that is worth mentioning. However, due to the risk of contamination in the controlled zone it is not allowed to eat or drink things that have been in the beam.
Yow, toasty.
[+] [-] blamazon|2 years ago|reply
> At times, Fourth Wave innovations verge into the realm of obsession, making you wonder how much real difference all of this precision makes to a cup of coffee. At the end (or beginning) of the day, coffee is a ritual. More than mere caffeine delivery, these technologies enable a multi-faceted sensory experience. Exploring the complexity of its flavors and aromas has transformed coffee from an article of consumption into an open-ended object of scientific and aesthetic experimentation.
[+] [-] fabian2k|2 years ago|reply
But once you e.g get into arguments on whether high-end grinders with conical or flat burrs are better you're far into the diminishing returns that might not survive a blind test.
[+] [-] bragr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] culi|2 years ago|reply
https://www.scanofthemonth.com/scans
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supportengineer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowmessage|2 years ago|reply
> Removing used coffee immediately after brewing and storing the AeroPress with the seal pushed all the way through the chamber (as shown) can help minimize wear by reducing compression to extend the gasket’s life.
But, that's not what's shown. Pushing the gasket all the way through isn't possible unless the filter head is removed.
[+] [-] amatecha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angst_ridden|2 years ago|reply
Every few years, soaking the rubber seal in mineral oil overnight then cleaning will restore flexibility (otherwise it shrinks over time, reducing the quality of the seal).
Unrelated: using paper filters is less eco-responsible than the gold foil filter, but makes for better coffee.
[+] [-] Reason077|2 years ago|reply
Europeans (and other countries with ~230V household sockets) would consider this quite poor performance for a kettle. 3000 W kettles are not uncommon here in the UK!
[+] [-] everybodyknows|2 years ago|reply
> ... Fellow is at the top of the gooseneck game with their Stagg EKG electric kettle line. Let’s see how they manage to achieve unmatched precision in temperature control ...
FWIW, I owned a Fellow, until it failed. Now happily replaced with an OXO kettle: 1500W; much better ergonomics, at least for those with larger hands; fewer steam burns; more readable temperature display.
[+] [-] rollcat|2 years ago|reply
It reaches the desired temperature before I'm done preparing everything else (throw the beans in the grinder, pre-heat the V60, etc), so it does not matter that it can't draw 3kW.
[+] [-] tomasGiden|2 years ago|reply
https://exciscope.com/applications/food-and-packaging/
[+] [-] GoofballJones|2 years ago|reply
Well done!
[+] [-] kristofferR|2 years ago|reply
Some call the 2006 liquid explosive terror plot a failure, but it's been one of the most effective ever IMO. The economic and environmental effects [2] of the ban have been massive, likely resulting in thousands of lives lost.
[1] ECAC EDS C3
[2] At London's Heathrow Airport alone, approximately 2.2 tons of liquids, aerosols, and gels were confiscated every day in 2017.
[+] [-] riobard|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klausa|2 years ago|reply
You want your water in your Aeropress to be as close to boiling as possible if using lightly roasted beans (which I'd wager is most of Aeropress usage)! None of that 80-85 degree celsius nonsense.
Similarly, their description of ceramic burrs is bizarre. Ceramic burrs are not considered "better" than stainless steel ones! If you look into high-end grinders sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars (both commercial and "enthusiast" ones), they will all have stainless steel burrs!
And don't get me started on their description of conical vs flat burrs...
[+] [-] mlsu|2 years ago|reply
"We spotted casting issues with the new pot" "We can see the density difference in the plastic" "We found aluminum shavings"
For the right audience, this would definitely sell one of those big fancy CT machines.
Not that I'm complaining -- visuals, presentation, content is all thoroughly interesting, speaking as someone with an Aeropress, a Moka. Pretty awesome piece.
[+] [-] C-x_C-f|2 years ago|reply
> The history of coffee provides a rich index of global economic and cultural exchange going back thousands of years.
The history of coffee is less than 600 years old.
[+] [-] for1nner|2 years ago|reply
Well this is just...not true. Porlex musta sold them pretty hard on Conicals.
[+] [-] exabrial|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlowrian|2 years ago|reply
Funny, how I’m finding out about that from a CT scan of my kettle :)
[+] [-] tpl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hex4def6|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LorenDB|2 years ago|reply
To be clear, I like the content displayed here; it's just that the way they chose to move between views of the CAT scan are a little annoying to me.
[+] [-] jefftk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calpaterson|2 years ago|reply
I switched to one of the (Bialetti-made) stainless steel ones ("Venus" shape) because at one point I lived somewhere with an induction hob. I immaculately saw that the stainless version was considerably easier to clean. Cleaning, afterall, is half the job of using one of these.
Visually, I prefer the aluminium shape of course, but they are a real nightmare to keep clean and presumably you're drinking a lot of that aluminium oxide.
[+] [-] rjsw|2 years ago|reply