Hi Crema team - great to be on-board. What can I say - I'm married with a lovely coffee loving wife and two teenage girls, we have always been into good coffee, and like most of my hobbbies - I can become a little obsessive. Other hobbies past & present include motorcycles, cycling, diving, audio, DIY & electronics to name a few. I live for weekends when I can wake up and think about making the first coffees of the day. I recently got roped into a barista comp and ended up in the finals where I managed to DNF with a choked second shot. We have had very modest thermoblock espresso machines for the last 15 years or so, about 6 in total, with the last one being a trusty (we look after them so they last) sunbeam 6910. I have since the beginning modded filter baskets on our earlier machines with a dremel to turn them into single walled so I could learn to grind dose & tamp correctly, so no stranger to the core concepts. I decided to get the E61 based HX machine I had always lusted after after my finals experience, however I got totally sidetracked by the Breville DB, with the inner geek in me thinking this looked a very interesting locally developed category killer. Early impressions are pretty favourable so things are looking good, the machine is a total joy to use. Undoubtedly I will try again to win a Giotto next year, but in the meantime the BES900 is ticking all the right boxes, just got to get the consistency of shots going. Thats enough about me - I look forward to learning some more from the collective knowledge that abounds in these forums, and pray that I don't get hooked in the uber excessiveness that I found lurking in hifi land. I'm sure that coffee addicts are more level headed than audio nuts, but I'm not too sure.
