Warrior, I wish you would have been pulling shots on the Bosco at the SCAA. Cafe Vita wasn't doing a very good job of highlighting the Bosco's ability and I surely wanted to see that machine at its best.
Now on to a lever ramble...
Every lever pulls differently and a lot of lever (and non-lever) people prepare their shots and pull their shots using different methods. I didn't see any common methodology going on behind the Bosco shot routine. When I got behind the Bosco to pull a shot I used general standards but without knowing the intricacies of the routine I ended up with a sub-par shot, similar to the sub-par shot the baristas were pulling.
These lever prep and pull differences behind one machine, fall inline with what occurred in Milo's hotel room on multiple machines as everyone was playing on the lever's. The shots were all over the ice based on grind settings and machine temps/pressures but as things started to normalize the other differences became apparent like my 3-5lb tamp pressure (for lever) versus someone else hitting the coffee bed with a 30lb tamp pressure. Only by hovering over shoulders and talking about standardizing to X could we have got things further normalized as a group. Some levers pre-infuse differently than others, some require a Fellini, some are etc, etc, etc.
All of that got me to thinking as I sat in the hotel room watching all of the action. I think there's something to be said about spending more on a lever as opposed to spending less. That larger budget should help improve thermal issues, back to back shot ability, possible 'wider bandwidth of cooperation', consistency, etc. The more competent the machine the easier the learning curve. As a lever noob I didn't start figuring things out on my machine until I had a couple of hundred shots under my belt, on the same machine. The key for my lever education was I compressed it into a smaller time frame doing multiple back to backs per day in order to start forming trends. With those trends I could then start forming experimental patterns, in order to come back to the trends again. Doing that all on the same machine helped me learn that machine, and having a competent and consistent machine that wasn't holding me back was key to exploring the lever in a deeper fashion. Having a lever that restricts you to a couple of shots a day due to thermals, or whatever, is a frustrating limitation in my opinion. And so for Jim (or whoever) I would recommend looking at a lever that allows multiple (8-10 in a row) pulls per day, pulls that are consistent and predictable, therefore enhancing the experimentation opportunities in a shorter period of time which help create/reinforce a faster learning curve. Levers are fun, shiny, groovy but stepping back from the real-time pressure profiling and tweakability it is ultimately just a coffee device. Hopefully one that makes you want to pull another shot, simply because you are now capable of pulling a good shot.
I've already said I think a one group PVL would be a good machine for Jim but I suppose that Mirage would also do in a pinch. ;-)
