I’m thinking the Strada EP1 would be the best you can get today?

Electronic pressure profiling, with a saturated head and all the high quality you’d expect from a LM machine.

  • drekly@lemmy.worldOP
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    1 year ago

    Why would a Strada be worse for dialling in than a Decent? Surely that’s a grinder issue, not a machine issue?

    • tankplanker@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The Strada and Decent are very different machines, the Strada by comparison is very basic but can take a punishing workload more suited to a proper cafe, the Decent is better suited to someone who wants to play around. Granted you can buy the more expensive Decents that have a higher duty cycle but even then, for longevity and back to back high volume workload my money would by on the Strada.

      If you plan on regularly (more than once a week) switching beans and properly dialing them in till you hit that god shot rather than just acceptable or good level, then that means a lot of shots in a short space of time. If that’s what you are into then the Strada is probably the better bet, although even then its massive overkill vs. a Linea Mini or similar. Personally I would rather spend the thousands saved on buying more grinders, the flexibility of having three high end grinders, one for clarity, one for body, one for pour over, without having to swap burrs and re-calibrate would far out weigh any benefit as a home user to having a Strada.

      The Decent on the other hand may lose in duty cycle vs. the Strada but it has many additional features that for a home user who only changes beans every few weeks rather than multiple times a week and isn’t chasing daily god shots. Parameter based programs on the Decent allow you to work around actual pressure (rather than just flow) and temperature (as it blends hot and cold water, rather than manipulating boiler temp) so the Decent can adjust the program during the shot for you if the beans aren’t quite ground right to give you a cup that’s somewhere between acceptable and good. When you do not have the time, beans, or money to waste chucking less than optimal shots, that is incredibly useful. Couple that with the ability to mimic other famous machines signature shot styles and the ability to develop your own or just download extra ones and auto play them.

      I would wager its that day to day utility that is going to be more useful for more people rather than the ability to do a dozen shots back to back hour after hour with little temperature variance. Sure, some people will want that in a home setting, but outside of youtubers doing coffee reviews, who needs it?

      • drekly@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        So it’s not about dialling it, it’s about whether you’re happy with a less than perfect shot and a machine that covers it up 😅

        I’m currently on a E61 machine with a EG-1, so no stranger to dialling in and getting the perfect shot. The GS3 is likely the next real step up, but the Strada offers the consistent electronic profiling that other machines lack (so surely you could have the same profiles that the decent offers?)

        The decent is an odd beast without it’s boilers and with it’s strange noisy pump, and it’s old school UI that’ll only age more with time. I’m super curious about using one, and the nerd in me loves the sound of all that data and graphing, but it just seems like a toy compared to a big sturdy boiler machine. Id be interested to try one for a week, but I don’t even know if it would make a better cup than my E61.

        Ideally I’d want everything that a GS3 offers, combined with the decent nerdiness… And there’s not many of those around. The Sanremo YOU, or the Synesso ES-1 look like interesting contenders.