I wrote a story about my love for my Rancilio Silvia coffee machine and the Sydney Morning Herald has just published it on the Saturday edition opinion page.
The piece was inspired by all the advice on the internet on how to brew the perfect cup of coffee using this famous Italian machine.
You can see the original on the SMH site – please comment on it there, they might want more stuff from me! However, for your reading pleasure I reproduce it here. By the way, I got it at a great price, you have to pay $699 for one now.
Coffee machine my one true love
John Sharpe
Published: October 12, 2013 – 3:00AM
My latest love is a beautiful Italian called Silvia. She’s a harsh dominatrix who demands strict obedience, but now I’ve learnt to submit to her whims, we make terrific coffee.
Rancilio Silvia (her full name) has a strong, shapely body of brushed stainless steel that hides a heart of pure brass – a boiler.
Here are some of her other fine points: commercial group head, ball-joint steam wand, firm rocker switches and an electromagnetic vibratory pump. Oooh! (OK, enough of the blatantly sexist metaphor).
My old coffee machine gave up the ghost, but it was never much good anyway. This time I determined to go for something better. I decided against a capsule machine – not bad coffee, but not the real deal.
I chose the Silvia after many hours of internet research. I found an online world full of coffee geeks who will argue over grind size, extraction temperature and how high to hold your elbow while tamping.
The verdict on Silvia was good – great coffee, but only when handled properly. I had graduated from a home barista course and was confident of my skills, so I took the plunge and found a place in Leichhardt selling them for a bargain $499.
The good news is I can now make coffee (espresso, cappuccino and latte) the equal of the best coffee shop barista. The bad news is it has taken some time, more money and lots of beans to get it right. The portafilter (the bit with the handle you put the coffee in) is the same as a commercial model’s. This means that to get a perfect brew, the grounds must be the right consistency, the dosage (the amount) accurate, and the tamping (pressing down the coffee in the portafilter) just right.
If the grind is too fine or the tamping too hard, the water won’t come through at all. If the grind is too coarse or the tamping too light, the water runs through too quickly and gives you weak coffee.
Silvia came with a plastic tamper, but I junked that and invested in a $75 stainless-steel one. (I was frugal – you can pay twice that for a good one.)
It’s vital to have freshly roasted beans and to grind them just before brewing. I had to invest in a new $200 Sunbeam grinder with magic bits called conical burrs. ”The conical burrs minimise heat transfer to the coffee due to their slow rotation. This maintains the quality of the coffee and ensures a consistent, even grind,” the advertising hype says.
The ideal extraction is a double shot (60 millilitres) taking 25 seconds. If you need help, there are 18,500 Youtube videos showing how to achieve perfection, but all in a slightly different way! (If you really have problems, you can invest in a refractometer starter kit [$599] which ”analyses a sample of your coffee and returns the percentage of total dissolved solids. When this result is entered into software, you can see exactly where your sample sits relative to the ideal extraction”.)
The Silvia has much more steam volume than my old machine and needs no special techniques to turn milk into silky microfoam latte. But you can’t brew and steam at the same time. If you brew first you have to throw a switch then wait a couple of minutes for the steam to get up to temperature. This is a problem only if you are producing lots of coffees.
As a Silvia owner, you can join online forums to discuss the finer points of bottomless portafilters, dwell time and puck saturation, or take sides in the debate about pre-infusion.
There are even Silvia tune-up parts. You can buy an add-on kit for a Proportional-Integral-Derivative mechanism to control boiler temperature, complete with digital readout ($125). You can change to a flat shower screen ($20), or add a pressure gauge ($60).
For me, there’s no need for extras. There’s still magic in our cyborgian symbiosis, so I’ll stick with the pure Silvia for now. But maybe I should think about roasting my own beans?
