Video Overview | Astoria Tempesta Commercial Espresso Machine
Astoria's Tempesta is a fully featured multi-boiler espresso machine that goes toe-to-toe with the best of them! It packs in high-tech features like a live graph of pressure and flow rate for every shot, independent brew boilers with PID temperature control, and cool touch steam wands with tons of power. Discover more about the Tempesta in this video, as Steve takes a look at the latest machine from Astoria.
Transcript
Hey guys. This is Steve with Prima Coffee. Today, we're taking a look at the Astoria Tempesta. It is their newest high-end espresso machine, both beautiful to look at on the outside and lots of really awesome stuff going on inside as well. So obviously, I have a two-group model with me today. The Tempesta is available in both two and three groups. And what's really interesting about this is that, you know, obviously, Astoria is known for pretty well, or pretty good quality machines that tend to be a little bit more affordable, you know. They're not necessarily the highest end machines on the market until today. Now, we're bringing a lot of tech into the Tempesta, we're bringing an option from Astoria that really makes it a lot more competitive with some of those higher end things like, you know, La Marzocco and Nuova Simonelli. Machines that might have a little bit more kind of high-tech, high-profile features that make them a little bit more interesting for some of these modern cafes that want a beautiful machine with a little bit of flash as well.
Astoria Tempesta Commercial Espresso Machine
Available in 2 or 3 groups
\Featured Product
So the Tempesta is kind of going into that territory. Obviously, we have very notable features like this big, very beautiful body design, bright up-front LCD displays on the barista side of things, a very modern style, look, just a gorgeous machine to look at for sure. Inside, we have a multiboiler setup. So we have an 8.5 liter steam boiler with a 3000 watt heating element, plus individual brewing groups with their own boilers with 1.2 liter brew boilers with 1000 watts of heating element power each. Plus heating elements in the group head, so you have a very stable temperature system all through. The three group obviously has a third boiler and group but the steam boiler is the same ' size and power. So let's kind of take a look at what's going on on the barista side of things. Obviously, we have these big LCD touch displays. And, you know, as far as an interface for the barista, that's pretty nice as long as it works well and thankfully, these guys do. So we have six programmable volumetric buttons. Obviously, I have three singles and three doubles. I also have a hot water button and a continuous flow button, plus this button which is a mechanical button located right over the portafilter which is super handy, you can just sort of lock in the portafilter and hit this button.
Now, this button can be configured in a few different ways. One way is to have it set up as a purge. So let's say you've just finished pulling your shot, you can take out your portafilter, knock out your puck, hit this button, get a few second purge and then your rinse your portafilter and lock back in. Also rinse those stray grinds off your spray heads. You can also set it up so it pulls just your standard normal double which is the center double button on the display. And that can be pretty handy because maybe, you're just pulling a lot of shots under that recipe profile. It's really, really convenient to just lock in your portafilter and hit that button without having to come up and hit the touch screen as well. So if that's kind of like your most common shot that you pull, that's a really handy button to have. Now, like I said, all these buttons are set up as volumetric. So, you can program each and in fact, I can show you a little bit here. If we go into our coffee recipes, you can take a look at these and you can set up your pre-infusion time, you can set your volume in milliliters as desired. So you can have six different shot profiles.
So let's say you like to pull a little bit shorter shots with maybe a little bit longer pre-infusion time for cappuccinos and other milk drinks. You can set that up pretty easily and it's obviously, it's very easy to access even as a barista. You know, a lot of other machines make it a little bit harder to navigate those submenus. This is a great, you know, having a visual display is a really great way to go in and be able and change these parameters and, you know, setting something for a preinfusion is as simple as tapping that actual preinfusion time, changing a value and hitting OK. So it's a very, very intuitive menu, very easy way to set up your brewing recipes. You can head back out and take a look at some of the other features that we have. So again, I have these six programmable volumetrics. I also have a hot water button. We have a hot water wand just on the left side of the machine and both groups can access that hot water dispensing. You can actually program your hot water dispense in seconds just the same way that you would program your other recipes. So very easy to set that up and, you know, let's say that you typically only use it to rinse something.
You only need two or three seconds. You can set it to that. If you more typically use it to fill up cups for like an Americano or something, you can set it to 8 to 10 seconds or something like that, you know. You have a lot of versatility in how you set that up. And you can actually change it based on the group that you're using. So each group can be set independently in terms of recipes. And then, we also have this, we also have the global recipes basically. So if I go into my recipe choice in the menu, I have four recipes set up that basically are sort of overall programs that allow me to set coffee boiler temperature, the group temperature, I can set up my different volumetric settings for each of these recipes. So I have four options and I can load them independently on each group that I have or set it back to a standard recipe as well. So technically sort of five recipe choices that I can use to set group and boiler temperature plus my actual volumetric profiles. So tons of options in terms of customization and kind of loading things back and forth. So like let's say you're running a single origin coffee on one group and your house blend on another, you can really easily kind of set those up so they're running separately for what you need.
Now, taking a look at some of the other things that we have going on, obviously, we have this great big workspace, super accessible, we have raised groups with a lot of clearance. So tons of open workspace which is really great as a barista. You don't tend to feel very cramped on this drip tray or in the work area. Very big actuating steam arms with tons of steam power and we have these great tunable steam levers. So there's a little bit of play in terms of how much that valve opens up and you can kind of fine-tune it as needed. These steam arms stay pretty cool to the touch, even for sort of extended periods of steaming. They do get a little bit warm after a while but, you know, it's not quite like a really hot steam wand where you grab it as soon as you're done steaming it and it's going to burn you. So even though they're long and sort of you know, kind of "in the way" so to speak, they're not really too harmful, they stay very comfortable to the touch. And that tunable lever is really great in terms of steaming smaller quantities of milk. You can very easily control your steam with just kind of a quick pull lever and you get a real good feel for what position you want that to be in for how much milk you're steaming and what kind of texture you like. Great big drip tray.
Obviously, you know, it's very accessible, easy to remove and clean, and of course, we have nice, big portafilters. So some of the story is other model portafilters don't take quite as deep baskets but I've actually got Pullman baskets in these, that has 19 to 22 grams. So kind of borderline double triple. So it's got really, really deep portafilters that will accommodate a larger basket if that's what you like. Fifty-eight millimeter groups and steel portafilters, really, really great, you know, quality, very modern-style espresso machine and again, kind of designed to be more competitive with some of those higher-end models that you see on the market today. So let's pull a shot. We're just going to go through, I'm just going to pull a standard double and we'll get to take a look at one of the more interesting features of this screen. So obviously, we have a great big touch screen here which is a really nice display to have. Not only when you're using in programming the machine but while you're using it as well because when you are pulling your shot, you can actually have a graph display that in real time will show your pressure and your flow rate. So if I just hit my double here, you'll see I immediately get a graph showing up. I've got a time counter on the top, I've got a readout of my pressure in bars, I also have a graph of my pressure and I can have a readout of my flow rate as well if I like.
So in real time, you're seeing, you know, more or less the metrics of what's going on with this shot which means that, you know, if I were to see a dip in pressure or actually, if my pressure shoots up far too quickly, I can kind of get a sense of what's going on with my shot without having to wait the full 30 or so seconds to say, oh, man, you know, that ran fast. Or, you know, that seemed to sort of choke up. You get a much quicker sense of what's going on and especially when you're looking at flow rate, it takes a little bit of learning but you can kind of understand what's going on in terms of your pre-infusion stage, how fast, you know, your coffees, or how fast your coffee is pulling or how much flow is going through the puck, like perhaps you have some channeling going on because your flow rate is higher than expected really early on in the shot. So there's a lot of interesting ways that you can use that information as a barista to make sure that you're pulling very consistent shots. Otherwise, obviously, you still have the ability to say, well, you know, my volumetrics are set up, I have the right volume in the cup and it took this amount of time. You can go a couple of steps beyond that to say, well, here's what my pressure looked like and here's what my flow rate looked like during the course of that shot.
So really interesting information to have as a barista. Probably takes a little bit of time to get used to and sort of understand what patterns you want to look for and what, you know, what you want your graphs to look like. But at least you have that information which means that you are going to be a more informed barista which probably means you're going to be able to better dial in your coffees and make sure they're running consistent throughout the day. So overall, very interesting set of features. A very impressive high-end machine coming from Astoria with lots of versatility, lots of programming ability to make it do what you need it to do and what you want it to do as well as stay consistent throughout the day. So that is the Astoria Tempesta.
