Video Overview | Espresso Travel Kit and Ultimate Espresso Travel Kit

Transcript

Hey, guys. It's Steve with Prima Coffee here. Today we're going to take a look at our travel espresso bundles and let you know what's going on with those and why they're going to make your life a little bit better. So the sort of center point between both bundles is the Nomad Travel Espresso Maker and the Lido E-T as a grinder. So, the Nomad is a really kind of a smart little travel grinder. It's not the most compact thing in the world. You're probably not going to throw this in a backpack, but it is really capable and we were honestly pretty surprised at the performance that you get out of it. Now, this is a completely non-electric travel espresso maker. So, it does not heat its own water, it doesn't require any electricity, but it's still very simple to use. We have a little reservoir back here. It holds 10 ounces of water. You'll see this pump mechanism here. This is a sort of seesaw-like air pump which powers and provides pressure for your extraction. If I lift up the lever here, I can pull out the sort of brewing drawer. We have a 49 millimeter steel basket, it holds about 15 to 16 grams of coffee. It sort of depends on how fine your grinding and the density of the coffee that you're using. I think the most that we've ever squeezed into there was about 17 grams. So, maybe a little bit smaller than the doubles you're used to, but still well within standard double territory.

Espresso Travel Kit

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Perfect for camping, road trips, the office, or at home

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This also has sort of...there's like the drawer slider piece, there's the kind of fitting or like brew assembly with the basket. All of this comes apart for easy cleaning. There's also an additional piece that we've already taken off. It's sort of a crema enhancer valve. We do recommend that you remove that for more standard style espresso. So once you've packed in your coffee in here, it includes a 49 millimeter tamper, you can tamp it down. Insert this whole thing right back in and then lock down the lever. Now, you also notice you have a valve or a dial on the top that tells you what your brewing pressure is at. We have a green zone highlighted between 6 and 10 bars. That's just to kind of give you a good target point for when you're extracting. It's not the most sort of steady extraction because you are sort of pumping the entire time that you're brewing. If you pump in smaller pumps, you can kind of keep it within a half bar, but it's really difficult to keep it at like exactly nine bars. So it's not quite as steady as a commercial espresso machine, but again still very capable. It's pretty easy to hit that eight to nine bars, it's pretty easy to keep it somewhere within that range, and you're going to get a good, solid double shot out of that.

Now, the Lido as well is a very capable hand grinder. So, between the two of these, you've got a pretty serious travel espresso kit. The Lido has 48 millimeter conical steel burrs. Really, really nice grind consistency. And the Lido E-T specifically has this folding handle for travel. It comes with a carrying case. Holds way more coffee than you need for a double shot espresso, but it can also grind for drip or pour over French press, whatever you might like to brew on the side. The thread adjustment is a finer pitch than the standard Lido 3, hence being one of the E-series grinders. But overall the grind quality is the same, assembly is the same. We have dual bearing construction so very, very stable. The grind adjustment is quite easy. All you have to do is unlock these two rings. You can turn the fine ring out of the way, use the large ring to make your adjustment and then turn the fine ring again to lock in that setting. So very, very easy grinder to use. Very well built and really excellent performance in the cup for espresso. So that is the baseline travel espresso bundle.

Ultimate Espresso Travel Kit

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High quality tools to use for many adventures to come

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Let's take a look at what you get if you order the ultimate. We're going to add the addition of the Bellman Stovetop Steamer as well as a stainless steel steaming pitcher. So, with a Bellman you are able to fill this up with about 20 ounces of water. You can use less, it's totally fine. Fill this up with water, put it on your stove. You just take this lid off, you can take this little basket out, put your water in there, put it all back together. Make sure it's nice and well-sealed. You'll notice that those gaskets are nice, they're like a bright orange. So once you seal it up you just want to make sure that every thing's finger tight and you're not seeing any orange anywhere. Get that on your stove top. You'll heat it up. And you'll notice here on the handle there's a pressure relief valve. So that's a safety valve, but it's also sort of the operating pressure. So once that starts to hiss, you'll know that you're at steaming pressure. So we have a two-hole steam tip here. You can get your milk in your pitcher. Once this whole thing is heated up and steaming, you can use the valve here to open and close your steam. Steam your milk. After you've pulled your shot, pour some latte art, enjoy a nice little cappuccino.

So, overall, this whole kit is a really nice travel kind of kit or maybe even just sort of a lighter weight kit. Again, it's not dependent on electricity. We have a manual grinder, we have a manual espresso machine, we have a stove-top steamer. So if you have like a cabin or something that you visit from time to time and you'd like to have a simple espresso kit, that would be a great option. Or even putting it in a camper or, you know, honestly, like if you have the means, like a stove at the office, you could bring it to the office. That sort of thing. So it's just not quite as, you know, big and bulky and requiring such an investment as a full-on espresso kit, but still very capable. Couple other things that we might recommend looking at is this STC Stand X with a butane burner. So this is really great for, you know, let's say you need to heat your water or you need to heat your steamer, you have a great little compact, and this is laser-cut stainless steel, so a nice compact stand. It's pretty versatile.

We have a very nice butane burner, really easy to use. Butane is cheap and abundant so it's easy to fill, and it's quite a powerful burner. So it might take a little while to heat a Bellman up to pressure. We would recommend using a smaller volume of water in that case. But if you want to heat your brewing water for your espresso, you can either set it up like this and just heat your kettle or what have you on top of it. Or you can even, if you have a smaller pitcher or something, you can set it in like this. So it's convertible to kind of make it more convenient to use for whatever brewing apparatus you have. So there you have it. That's our travel espresso kit, both the basic and the ultimate. Really quite a lot of versatility there and a surprisingly capable little manual travel espresso machine. We really hope that you like what you see. Thanks for watching.