The thing you have going for you is that you have consumed amazing shots of espresso at one time or another, so at least you would be able to compare the shots you were pulling to something and judge their quality / how well you are doing. The main thing I think makes levers a challenge is also the same thing that makes them so great, your ability to manipulate the shot. You can grind and tamp a million different ways and compensate for those parameters by pre-infusing for longer or shorter periods of time, you can pull the lever down again anywhere throughout the shot to alter flow rate and you can even push, ever so slightly, up on the lever if the shot is pulling too slow for you.
If you are looking for more layers of flavor and more nuanced flavors I would tell you to look at the machines with smaller groupheads / portafilters. They tend to not be the best machines for entertaining a lot of people, with Staylors 2 head Ponte Vecchio being the real exception, because of their small boiler size and the time you have to wait for the group to depressurize after pulling a shot (1-2 minutes). With what is available right now I think Staylor has the most versatile machine in that group on the market. All together, the small group levers are steam monsters. My Elektra Micro Casa a Leva was an absolute animal. I have had somewhere around 10 levers and can without a doubt say that the most unique shots came from the Elektra and Olympia. My girlfriend consistently reminds me of how much she like the small milk drinks I made for her with the Elektra.
I have pulled my fair share of horrible shots on lever machines, but at the end of the day I personally enjoy the end results as well as the overall experience on a lever so much more than a semi-auto. I still enjoy shots from semi-autos, but just for different reasons.
The only thing I would caution you on (as I'm now experiencing it myself) is the rabbit hole of lever possibilities. Not the kind of rabbit hole stuff we've discussed earlier but the idea that's been forming in my pea brain for a couple of months now... "what could I do with other levers, more capable levers, better levers, different levers, older levers?"
I like the PVL, I do. But I also want to see what the G3 of levers can do, or at least somewhere in the middle between the PVL and a Kees lever. I also wonder about the old Italian levers. I wonder about some of the stuff Warrior372 has pulled on and I wonder what's holding me back from 'better'. And that gets to the crux of my lever dilemma... what is 'better' or more correctly what is 'lever espresso'? Of course the path is long and winding and I've only just crossed the threshold but already I'm staring off into the distance and wondering what's over the crest of that hill. If you know yourself and you know you might eventually be thinking the same thing, you might want to start chunking away a couple of 5'ers every now and then, enough to buy your first machine and enough to start saving for the next one. ;-)
Ummm . . . . Yea. That definitely happened to me. The reason I started refurbishing and selling levers is because I started wondering if other machines could possibly fulfill more of what my palette happened to like at the moment. I do not have enough disposable income to go out and purchase every machine I wanted to try, so I started trolling for deals. When I see a lever I am interested in playing with priced for $500 or less I would buy it, rebuild it, play with it and if it did not impress me / my palette I would sell it (That was the plan. . . . I think I have only sold 3-4 of them and have about 7 in all different stages of being rebuilt in my apartment. . . ). So, I went from a 49mm Elektra to a 49mm Cremina and then onto commercial levers.
In my opinion, what 58mm commercial levers have in temp stability and convenience they lack in the neighborhood of layers and nuanced flavors. They have more than a comparable 58mm semi-auto, but the flavors hit much differently pulling shots on a 58mm versus pulling shots on machines with smaller groups. I think that is one of the reasons La San Marco has such a cultish following. They make commercial levers that can be left on forever, they have a huge water capacity, temp stability (due to the massive amounts of metal used) and can bang out shots (like all commercial levers), but they also have a 53mm grouphead / portafilter setup so you can still get a similar flavor profile to something like an Elektra MCaL, Olympia Cremina, Ponte Vecchio.
It is definitely a different world
.
