My birthday is still almost two months away but she found a really good deal on it (used but in good condition) and was too excited to wait. Plus we don’t really have anywhere to hide it for that long without me accidentally finding it anyway.
I’m still learning how to use it but it’s been fun so far. My first two shots (yesterday) weren’t great, my third (today) turned out a lot better, and my fourth was nearly perfect. Still too inconsistent to be confident yet but I’m enjoying the learning process. I’ve heard the GCP is user upgradable, I may look into that in the future. I’ve read that upgrading the over pressure valve is a big upgrade, as is a brass boiler, but that’s for future me to think about, right now I still want to learn how to use it. I’ve also read about Gaggimate and Gaggiuino which seem really interesting. Again, I’ll do that rabbit hole in the future. I know there’s lots of gadgets and stuff for espresso too, that’s something else I’ll want to get into in the future, but for right now I’m really having fun just trying to figure out pull time, heat up time, grind size, etc. My wife is also having a ton of fun with it.
Also, I know there’s no scale in the picture but I do use one, I just figured the picture would look nicer staged like this.
Hell yeah, that’s an amazing machine! If you like tinkering and wanna make your Gaggia even better, check out GaggiMate if you haven’t already. It allows you to do pretty much everything something like a Decent DE1 ($2500+) can do such as pressure profiling, flow control, PID tuning, smart scale connection, etc. for a fraction of the cost.
It’s not too hard to install if you’re a little bit crafty either, took me about a day to install mine. I can’t recommend it enough.
I’ve heard of it but haven’t done much research yet. How does it compare to the Gaggiuino, do you know? I’ve heard good things about both.
It used to be behind Gagguino in terms of features, but it’s caught up incredibly quickly, now I believe the only thing Gaggimate doesn’t have is the option for an integrated scale built into the drip tray.
The biggest thing for me was that Gagguino recently stopped being open source, while Gaggimate is still committed to being fully open source. And in my opinion, Gaggimate has more polish and looks better visually. But definitely do your own research and compare them yourself if you’re curious.
From a quick bit of research the Gaggimate certainly seems more visually pleasing, and I like that it’s open source. I’ll do more research but right now that one seems like more of my thing. Thanks for the info.
First time I hear about it, how does it compare to the Gagguino?
They both have their pros and cons, with the main takeaway being that Gaggiuino tends to be a bit more configurable and stable but lacks visual polish and has less frequent updates. Gaggimate is the relative newcomer, but has since caught up to Gaggiuino in terms of features for the most part. But the biggest thing for me is that Gaggiuino is no longer open source, while Gaggimate is still fully committed to being open source which I find super important for a DIY project such as this.
Oh that sucks, I was not aware of it going closed source