# Rancilio / Eureka



## philw (Jun 21, 2015)

The "Morris Marina" of coffee machines, my supplier tells me, but he doesn't know that I have some fine memories of one of those.

My roaster lives elsewhere.

This is the tank machine as I don't actually drink that much coffee and I do need to use the rest of the kitchen for making food.

Review-wise, I'm still dialling this in, but it does what you'd expect.

The *Rancilio ST1 *was a replacement for a NS Oscar I'd run for a good few years, which replaced an earlier Gaggia. At two to three times the Oscar price, this is a much more powerful machine, capable of continuous operation I'd expect, and easily capable of steaming and brewing at the same time. I knew precisely how to drive the Oscar though, something which I'm still working on with this. The machine has power to spare, and that's the main thing I notice about it. The filters are beefy, and you don't have to hold the machine down whilst you rotate them in. I plumbed in the drain because the "take me out to empty me" tray is really fiddly. I use an external shot timer, although final tuning of the shot is "by eye". I may need to rig some LED lights down there to help with that in winter.

Dead easy to clean - there is some stainless steel, but it's not where you can get finger prints and most of the body is tough ABS. The drip-tray feels a bit crude, like you could cut yourself of the edges, although actually you can't. Inside there's more space than I found in the Oscar, although pretty agricultural.

I switched to this grinder from a big Gaggia (MDF?) I'd been using for years. This *Zenith Club E* is a stupidly large grinder, but it's quiet and the control system doesn't look like it was built in someone's garage. It grinds, although the delivered weight has some variation. But then my machine isn't automatic so that's easy to compensate for. It's a pleasure to use, hands free too. The little tray comes with the grinder and seems like a very Italian solution to the simple engineering problem of getting the grinds into the filter. However mostly the grinder does that perfectly - there's very little spill from this; certainly less than the Gaggia. Oh yes, the little hopper takes my 200g-per-roast without hassle directly from the drum.


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