Today we're going to be talking about this.

It's the 9Barista Espresso Machine.

It's like a stove top mako pot

that actually makes espresso.

This was created by a guy called William Playford.

His background is a jet engineer.

That's his bonafides.

It's beautiful.

And it's very clever.

It has three pieces.

The top one, probably the least interesting.

We'll come back to that in a second.

The main body is two parts.

One of which is a water chamber at the bottom.

Initially, you might think this looks

just like the base of a moka pot.

There's a pressure release valve, necessary and safe

but it's more than that.

It's actually two water chambers.

And this is the first point

at which this thing is pretty clever.

Now you'd fill this with about 110 to 120 mils of water.

Cold water as recommended by the manufacturer.

And while I like to use boiled water in a moka pot,

I've done as they've asked in this case here

but all of the clever things are here

in this part, in the middle.

Now you'll see that this little piece

has two little red gaskets here

and they are what divide the two chambers.

So when you screw it in,

there is a chamber below this gasket.

And one above this gasket.

The bottom chamber is where water is boiled

and it's trapped until it reaches very high pressures

until it reaches nine bars of pressure.

I think that's about 179 degrees Celsius

but I could be wrong.

The upper chamber here is quite clever.

It's going to act as a cooling bath.

This is gonna be confusing when I tell you

that the water in that cooling bath

is gonna be 100 degrees Celsius

or it's going to be at whatever temperature water boils

wherever you are.

Here, I'm at sea level

so it's 100 degrees Celsius.

The way this thing works

is that you have this water trapped, boiling away madly

in the bottom section.

When it reaches nine bars of pressure,

it opens a spring release valve inside this unit

allowing water to flow into this coil.

Now this coil is surrounded,

it's jacketed by this boiling water,

which is much, much, much cooler than the water

going into that tube is.

It's kept at 100 degrees Celsius

because this chamber is only at atmospheric pressure.

There's a little chimney here on the side

that allows water to sort of boil, thus keeping it

at a fixed temperature.

In flowing through this coil,

it should drop from 179 down to

about 100 degrees Celsius,

it's still a little bit hot,

before entering the final section of this part of the body

which is an additional heat sink.

That's what these fins are for.

Therefore it should exit the shower screen effectively

at about 93, 94 degrees Celsius.

That's the theory.

What you have on top

is basically an upside down portafilter.

I mean, it's exactly a portafilter.

There's a basket here, it comes out.

There's a little handle, it's a portafilter.

But by having it upside down,

the pressure comes from underneath,

it's dispersed through a little dispersion block

that sits on top of the coffee,

I'll show you that in a minute, and then flows

into this little collection chamber where you pour it

out and drink your espresso at the end of it.

It's ingenious, to be honest,

it's a fascinating solution to the problem

of how do I generate nine bars of pressure on a stove top?

We'll brew some coffee, taste it, talk about it.

And then afterwards, I'll give you my overall thoughts

about how this works and ultimately, who is this for?

So I have everything

amongst this chaotic collection of things

in which I need to make espresso with the 9Barista.

Now, when you buy it, it comes with this.

It's an adapter desk for gas or induction.

So this on its own does not work on an induction hub.

So I've got a small little gas burner here

and it works for these as well

just to disperse the heat a bit more evenly

and make it so it fits safely on top of any sized ring.

It does also come with a very cute little tamper,

which is nice and obviously necessary.

So let's make some coffee in here.

I have my cold filtered, delicious water,

a little bit below the suggested level for reasons

we'll talk about in a second.

Now, when you put this together,

you'll see this becomes submerged

and the water begin to cover this section of the chamber.

If you overfill, you will make a mess.

With anything where you're going to be

generating high pressures, you want to make sure

your gaskets are properly seated

so this is nice and tight.

Don't make it impossible to undo later.

You won't thank yourself for that, but make sure it's tight.

So now to prep the basket.

Now they recommend 20 grams of coffee.

That's probably a pretty good catch-all dose, but for me

I certainly prefer slightly lower doses.

So I'm kind of in that 18 and a half, 19 range

with this, I think it's 'cause the coffee

I'm using is perhaps a touch lighter

and therefore a little bit harder to extract.

And as we know from the video

on starting dose for espresso dialing in, which is up here

if you want to watch that, then if you have a lighter roast

that it helps sometimes to use a lower dose.

And tamp.

One last piece to go on

is this sort of dispersion screen

that does two jobs, it disperses water

and also keeps the coffee in

when you turn it upside down,

both fairly important things.

Lock in the group head

and we're ready to make some coffee.

Now, the one challenge of this unit, I suppose

is that the dialing in process

if you're trying to brew coffee after coffee

after coffee, after coffee, it's pretty slow, actually.

Their ideal brew time

from going on from cold is six minutes.

And you kind of want to hit that brew time.

So brewing back to back,

certainly when you get the unit for the first time,

it's gonna take a little while to really

kind of dial in your process.

And that six minute time is kind of important, actually.

If you miss it then a couple of bad things can happen.

You can either potentially evaporate

all of the water in your upper chamber

because it will boil.

You could boil it so dry

that you end up insufficiently cooling your brewing water

and having an aggressive, steamy brew.

I've certainly done that when trying to find

that kind of right heat setting

for this particular unit.

You kind of want to work out and tweak and aim

for a six minute brew by testing.

You're gonna make some bad coffee when you get this.

You're unlikely to nail it out of the gate.

If you did well, well done you.

You're aiming for six minutes

and the trouble with that in some ways

as part of the dialing in process,

is that you don't know if it's gone wrong

until you get to six minutes and nothing's happened, right?

If you're heating it too slowly, at six minutes

you find out things have gone wrong.

That's a bit frustrating for me.

The dialing in process has definitely been

a little bit too slow and sort of drawn out.

And then you've got to cool it down,

take it to pieces, refill it.

It's not a back-to-back unit.

And certainly, it's not going to be great at producing lots

of coffee for lots of different people quite quickly.

This is something that you buy for you.

So now we're starting to hear some boiling

and that boiling is the upper chamber.

This is where I've had a couple of issues

and it's an issue that they know about.

And we'll talk a little bit about the fix afterwards

but that bubbling can be a little bit too angry,

a little bit too intense.

It coincides typically with the unit

really coming up to pressure and coffee happening

as long as you've got the heat right.

And at this point,

you kinda want to pay attention to what's going on.

You can have some issues

with water spitting out of the chamber

which is obviously bad, but coffee is now happening.

And it looks very good.

I have made some espresso.

Oh yeah.

So let's taste it in a second.

I'm just gonna put this in the sink,

cool it down a little bit.

So how is it?

Did it make delicious coffee?

Well it's pulled a decent size double.

It had some nice crema.

It's pretty good, it tastes like the coffee that went in.

Texture's nice.

You don't need to stir the shot because it's been stirred

by that kind of pouring action out of the 9Barista.

It would certainly work well as the base

of a milk drink if that's what you were interested in doing,

though obviously it has no method for heating milk.

As a straight shot though, pretty good.

I might drop the dose, tweak the grind a touch finer.

It's on the border of under extracted,

but that's on me and not on the machine so to speak.

Ultimately, it makes good tasting coffee.

It's certainly capable of producing the temperature

and the pressure that you would want.

It doesn't taste like a super hot shot.

You know what I mean?

When brew temperatures have gone a little bit too high,

it doesn't have that particular kind

of harsh bitterness that you get sometimes.

Pressure wise, it's hard to really know.

The physics, all that kind of stuff behind it

certainly make sense but I have no way

of measuring that effectively

so there's a bit of trust there.

What I will say is that it needs

a slightly courser grind than a traditional espresso machine

for the same kind of dose to flow normally,

which suggests possibly a slightly lower pressure.

It might be that the shot starts at nine bars

but obviously as pressure is released from the system,

that pressure may decline towards the end of the shot.

In order for this to appeal to you,

I think what you need is very limited space.

It is a good grinder for sure.

And no interest in milk drinks.

It's 295 pounds, which is expensive.

You can see where your money is going

in terms of design and build.

It's a small company, but I think that's probably

a fair price to achieve what they've achieved here

but it's still more expensive

than some traditional kind of lever machines.

Something like the Flair where, you know,

you're going to be adding the hot water

and the pressure yourself.