A cyclone, a baby, and the story of Newton Espresso.
“You want about 9 or 10 bars for a good espresso,” Alan informs me.
Coffee has a culture, and its own language. I drink but don’t speak it, whereas Alan and Hayden are fluent. Hayden Maunsell and Alan Neilson are the inventors of the Newton Espresso, a manual – non-electric – lever coffee machine they invented here in the Bay.
The ‘bars’ Alan is referring to are a measure of pressure, with one bar equalling 14.5psi. That’s about 150psi per cup, which as I watch Alan pulling the piston rod lever to make me a perfect long black, looks like a bit of effort, but it’s nothing to a true aficionado for whom nothing appears too much trouble in search of the perfect brew.
The discussion moves onto grind sizes and weight, and coffee crema which has a pattern that looks a little bit like a Cheetah’s coat if you get it just right.
It’s all quite technical and I wish I had paid more attention in physics. But temperature and pressure over time is how you build a coffee profile, and it’s not to be taken lightly if you like your coffee. Hayden’s bringing me up to speed on the Ross droplet technique, a trick that was unveiled at the world Barista champs, where the beans are sprayed with a fine water mist before being ground so as to stop the particles sticking with static electricity, which would reduce the amount of coffee in each dose.
The ideal temperature for a great espresso is between 92 – 96 degrees, and anything under makes the coffee bitter. Although, somewhat conspiratorially Hayden mentions there’s talk doing the rounds of a new technique for a low temperature espresso under 90 degrees. Scandalous.
And, like I said, quite technical.
Hayden very much likes his coffee which is how the Newton came to pass. After completing a design degree at EIT and adding a masters at AUT, he ended up working for Alan who was in charge of tech at the EIT School of Design.
Hayden’s role at EIT was to maintain machinery like pottery kilns, and the wood and metal shop tools. It didn’t pay that well, and one day he found himself in the cafeteria with enough change in his pocket for either coffee or lunch, but not both. He went for the coffee.
Back in the class he asked Alan if they could make their own coffee machine, and Alan reckoned ‘we could give it a go’. So they did. A kickstarter campaign to launch the Newton reached its $50k goal in an hour, a testament to the craftsmanship and no doubt to the passion of their customers.
“Simple is hard,” says Hayden about design. “It’s easy to add things, much harder to take them away.”
The first Newton, named after the measure of force, went through about ten or twelve iterations before Alan and Hayden were satisfied with the result. Although you get the sense that neither of them are truly satisfied, always on the lookout for improvement.
“You obsess over the details when you design something yourself,” says Hayden, who then gets immediately distracted from the photoshoot to discuss a further refinement with Alan, unwittingly proving the point.
First published by BayBuzz. Click here to read the full article.