Oh, I think it’s worth the price, as long as you manage expectations of what you’re buying. This is by no means a fancy/experimental light/medium roast (like deMello, another Toronto-area roaster) with lots of complex notes and flavours… the “42” is definitely a classic Italian base with a good aroma to it. It’s a post-roast blend, and it seems to me like at least 2, maybe 3 different roasts. 2/3 dark, with 1/3 medium/light beans, just based off casual observation.
It’s a pretty standard price in Toronto for a bag this size. If you’re local, you may be able to get a better deal if you visit the store in person. It’s a very nice lounge with 80-90s music (on vinyl!) and a friendly vibe.
Bullet was OK, nothing special. I think their biggest issue is that they are more of a “mainstream” roaster, i.e. their beans are not really fresh… and they only have a best before date.
I cracked open my bag of 42 today, roasted on Jan 3, 2024, so done degassing. Wow. It tasted OK with a standard Breville basket, but then I tried it with the IMS Big Bang basket… mind blown! Such a beautiful aroma! I feel like I need to tweak the recipe a bit more, but so far it’s one of the tastiest espressos I’ve had. Taste profile is reminiscent of “classical” Italian espresso, but with the aroma and taste notes (caramel/chocolate) of lighter roasts. I’m loving it so far!
This was brewed with a local roast near me called Reunion coffee roasters. The roast was Bullet Espresso, a medium-dark espresso roast. It was allright, nothing mind blowing.
Recently I discovered Burukudu, which is also a local roaster located within walking distance of my condo. I bought a bag of their 42 “Pete’s perfect” espresso blend… it’s gassing off right now (just shy of a week old), but dang, the aroma is mind blowing!! Can’t wait to crack open the bag next week and brew something yummy! According to the shop keeper, this guy Pete learned the recipe for this blend from his father. And it’s a family secret that’s passed on from generation to generation.
100% agree with you on this one. I entered this rabbit hole when I saw that Breville-branded cleaning tablets were made by Cafetto. Lonand behold, I found Cafetto tablets with identical specs on sale 10x cheaper than what Breville was selling them for. And powder was even cheaper, which is what triggered all this…
Check out Lance Hendrick’s 30 min milk steaming tutorial on Youtube, followed by his 30 min tutorial on latte art basics. I find his instructional methods easy to follow and implement with relatively quick and good results.
Speaking of manufacturers, apparently the Barista Touch Impress keeps an internal log of all drinks and maintenance activities performed on the machine. I also read on Breville’s website (or manual/warranty registration page?) that this log could be used by Breville to determine warranty eligibility. In other words, if the machine asks you to do maintenance and you keep postponing it, they may refuse to cover warranty service in the future… kinda ominous, if ya ask me… on the one hand I get it: why should someone that straight up neglected/abused their machine be offered the same warranty coverage as someone who always maintained their machine well, but on the other hand, this is some ominous big brother stuff… 😯
Actually grub 0.x series had much more useful rescue shell tab completion than the latest release. You could easily list all boot devices, partitions, and even filesystems and their contents. All from the rescue shell. Consequently, you could boot into Linux and reinstall grub in the MBR to fix it. All that without using a boot CD/USB! Good luck doing that with the latest version of grub and UEFI.
Also getting into the BIOS on legacy firmware was also very simple. On most machines it’s the three finger salute followed by either F1, Delete or rarely F11 or F12.
The boot process was simple, and the BIOS had just one simple task: load and execute the first 512 bytes of the disk that was designated as the boot device. That’s it.