We commonly receive calls from customers who are being prompted to empty the waste drawer (dregs box and water tray located with the brew group on the right side of the machine) more often than they deem necessary. There are two sensor lights that can indicate this needs to happen:

This light specifically indicates that the dregs drawer needs to be emptied	This light indicates any number of issues are present and is not specific — you may need to add beans, add water or empty the dregs drawer

The dregs box that catches used pucks doesn’t use a sensor that measures the volume, rather, it’s based on cup count — around every 10 shots it will indicate that the dregs box needs to be emptied. The waste water area under the brew group, however, is pressure sensitive and will indicate it needs to be emptied once a specific weight has been reached.

If you see the warning light and empty only the dregs box and not the waste water drawer as well, it will reset the dregs box shot count but then indicate (likely shortly thereafter) that the drawer needs to be emptied again because the waste water has reached capacity. And vice versa. Another cause for the frequency may be that the dregs box was removed, emptied and placed back into the machine too quickly or when the machine was off, so that the shot count was not reset.

You can easily keep these overactive lights at bay by thoroughly cleaning the dregs drawer — both the box and the waste water area — each time it indicates it needs to be emptied. Also, making sure you do this when the machine is on is very important. Finally, expect that it’s going to happen about every 10 shots or so — and if you’re drinking 4 – 6 shots a day, you won’t be able to let those little pucks hang out in the dregs drawer longer than a couple of days.

If you’ve misplaced your user manual and want to refresh your memory on how your Odea functions, here are PDF versions of the Giro and Go.

Gail shows us where to apply the lubricant on the brew group when it is time for a touch up. A general rule of thumb is that if you can see/feel the lubrication on the group, you’re probably as lubricated as you need to be. When applying, don’t put a large quantity into each area; just apply some to a q-tip and then put a light layer. We often see big globs applied that then mix with coffee grounds to make a rather dangerous cement. In this case, you can have too much of a good thing.

Sadly, it doesn’t have the patented Saeco Brewing System (SBS) that varies the pressure to give more or less crema on your shot, but there’s always a catch, right? If you have limited counterspace or cupboard clearance, this is definitely the superautomatic for you. Watch Gail take us through its features and demonstrate its functionality.

Gail steamed up each of the milks on the Rocket Giotto Evoluzione, Saeco Xelsis and Saeco Via Venezia to see which works the best, if there are commonalities or if each machine works better with different types of milk. Watch and learn the results!

Our partner in this venture is Uesugi USA, a Japanese company that (as luck would have it) have a US presence here in the Seattle-area. We pulled Henry into the mix and headed out to their facility to talk about what they do and see how they take these machines apart, break them down to their components and funnel them back into the commodity supply chain as cleanly as possible.

Please don’t try this at home

You do backflush if you own a machine with a valve system referred to as a three-way solenoid, brew pressure release, three-way valve, solenoid valve or any other combination of these phrases. Not sure if your machine has this? If your machine has an E61 brew group (such as those on Rockets, Quick Mills, Izzos or Grimacs), it has this valve system. Other models that feature this without the E61 are those made by La Spaziale, Pasquini, the Rancilio Silvia and Ascaso’s Uno Pro and Duo series. This valve system relieves pressure post-brew, which results in a drier puck, but it sucks a little bit of coffee and water into the system each time which can build up in there and adversely impact the machine’s performance. Backflushing forces detergent and water through the valve system, thoroughly cleaning it and maintaining the system. It also has the added benefit of cleaning up behind the brew head’s screen without taking it apart.

You don’t backflush if your machine doesn’t have this system — because you don’t have the valves to clean! Some machines that don’t need backflushing include the Saeco Aroma, Via Venezia, Sirena, models made by Breville, those from Francis Francis!/illy and Delonghi and Capresso semi-automatics. But since you’re not forcing detergent through the brew head, you will need to take it apart semi-regularly to clean up behind the brew screen.

The best way to determine if you need to backflush your machine is to read the manufacturer’s manual and the machine’s technical specifications to see if it has the valve system. If it doesn’t, you’re good to go; if it does, you should backflush once every 1 – 2 weeks, depending on how often you use the machine.

Not sure how to do it? Watch us backflush the Rocket Giotto E61 or the Rancilio Silvia.

But an appreciation rooted in gadgetgeek love is always at risk of being supplanted, and the Saeco Xelsis is definitely wooing us. Watch Gail take us through the features of both of these machines and demonstrate their one-touch cappuccino functionality.

Yeah — it’s still a tough call. You can get a deeper understanding by watching the complete individual reviews of the Xelsis and the Jura Impressa Z5.

The technique involves infusing the right amount of air and steam at the right pace to ‘stretch’ the milk, ultimately resulting in that wet paint texture that can be used in latte art, if you’ve got the skillz. You rest the tip of the steam wand on the surface of the milk and ‘ride’ it as the milk is slowly expanding with tiny air bubbles and coming up to temperature via the machine’s steam. You’ve got to keep a steady roll going, the bubbles to a minimum and eventually you’ll submerge the wand completely once you’ve achieved the amount of foam you want and need to simply bring it up to temperature.

Achieving good results is part skill and part equipment: Sustained dry steam that is served up from the boilers of large commercial espresso machines make the creation of microfoam a little bit easier. Also, the milk’s consistency (how much fat it has), age and temperature definitely play a part — you always want your milk to be cooled in the refrigerator until right before steaming in a pre-chilled pitcher.

So, yeah, there are a lot of elements — part art, part science — to keep in check when attempting to produce that lovely shaving-cream like texture. Understandably, many people that don’t want to make a career out of their espresso creation just don’t want to put in the time to learn how to do this.

In answer to their frustrations, several manufacturers over the years started to release adapters on their steam wands — called panarellos, auto-frothers, froth enhancement systems, the great fluff n’ stuff (okay, maybe not that one, but it could be) or any variation thereof — designed to simultaneously infuse a small amount of air with the steam so you don’t have to do a thing. Some of them do it better than others, and you end up with everything from super spongy meringue-like foam to nearly microfoam quality, depending on how the manufacturer designed the adapter. And even if you’re getting big bubbles and not the silky, dense foam you’re looking for, with a little bit of work (scraping off the top layer, spinning the milk around in the pitcher and tamping it from the bottom to burst larger bubbles, etc.), you can often get a suitable consistency.

You most often see panarellos and their like on the lower end machines that don’t have a lot of steaming power available (smaller boilers) so try to maximize the frothing potential by infusing more air into the milk. This can be good or bad, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, and occasionally you can adapt the wand to function more like a standard steam wand if you find the panarello action is not working for you.

People seem to either really love or really hate panarellos and we’re mixed about them; we have seen good and bad versions and so we don’t just dismiss them out of hand. In fact, more high tech versions are often deployed on high end commercial machines to facilitate efficient and consistent foam. So it’s not that systems that infuse air and steam without the operator’s assistance are essentially bad, but — like with most things to do with espresso machines — you get what you pay for.

Most importantly, know what you’re getting into. The majority of semi-automatic machines under $500 have these adapters on them, and nearly all superautomatics employ some form of this technology. So if you’d like to pick up a machine in one of these classes, you’ll need to either learn to love or learn to work around it.