The only way I enjoy drinking robusta is doing Vietnamese coffee with a phin and adding plenty of sweetened condensed milk. One thing to be aware of is that robusta has about double the caffeine of arabica. So depending on how caffeine affects you, you might want to take it easy.
Espresso is a big learning curve, especially if you want to get good at milk steaming, but the end result is fantastic once you get the hang of it.
I bought the 2019 model of the Gaggia Classic Pro earlier this year and really love it. I have a lot of prior experience as I was a manager and barista in a specialty coffee shop for a while, so that definitely expedited the process of learning how to get great results out of the machine. You may not have that experience to go off of, but there are a ton of great resources online for learning.
What grinder do you have? There’s a good chance you’re grinder may not grind fine enough or consistently enough for espresso. The one thing a lot of beginners underestimate when getting started is how important it is to have a good electric burr grinder that’s made to handle grinding for espresso. Those can cost a lot of money and generally run $300+ for entry level espresso grinding. All that said, for just getting started, I think it’s totally fine to have your local coffee shop grind your coffee for espresso while you start learning the process.
I’m not sure how the Evo comes set up, but the older model was not set up for espresso enthusiasts but rather consumers who aren’t looking to get too deep into it. As a result there were a couple upgrades that I found necessary out of the box; namely the tamper was just a piece of plastic, the portafilter came set up as a pressurized portafilter so I had to remove that piece of it, and the machine was set to 15 bar pressure so I had to switch out the OPV spring to get 9 bars. The Evo machine comes set at 9 bars out of the box so you won’t have to worry about that. I’m not sure about the tamper/portafilter situation though.
Espresso is a blast one you get the feel for it! Let me know if you have any other questions, I’m happy to help!
I think you may be mistaken. The Evo is simply the latest model of the Gaggia Classic Pro. It is a portafilter espresso machine. It is semi automatic in the sense that it has a pump and a boiler, but is not automatic in the sense that it has an integrated grinder and does the whole process for you.
Diminishing returns!
Lisa Laporte tweeted about it here: https://twitter.com/lisadlaporte/status/1673037899045171206
In a nutshell, it seems like the show got cut because viewership had drastically declined and wasn’t worth continuing to produce. If there’s additional drama behind the scenes, I haven’t heard any indication of it yet.
Honestly I’m kind of surprised the twit network is still around at all. Their overall product has seemed really dated to me for a long time and it seems like the podcast advertising realm is a real shit show right now.
Google’s messaging app actually has a desktop browser based client that you can use to send messages from your computer. So that might actually be a good solution for you. I use it regularly and have no complaints about either the phone app or the web app.