Some members of my group at CERN had the great idea recently to start a weekly coffee morning before our group meetings. For me this was an irresistable invitation to bring high-effort manual espresso to the work place. Chris and I hosted, with half of each of our home set up. Chris provided the grinder and I brought the espresso machine. The machine itself is a Flair 58 lever espresso machine - meaning there’s no boiler or pump, all the pressure is provided by hand and the hot water comes from a kettle. This way you can get really tasty coffee with a relatively portable setup. I’ve brought the same machine, using my hand grinder, for a few workshops and hackathons now. It was a lot of fun making coffee for the group, there’s always a lot of interest in the equipment and process when the lever machine comes out, looking like some extravagant alien device, and people seemed to like the brew that we made (only espresso or espresso with milk). It was a fun challenge also to make many coffees in a short window before our meeting, when I usually take about 10-15 minutes to make just one at home. In the end the bottleneck was actually my slow kettle; the grinder, machine, and milk foamer were all quite efficient, especially using two portafilters for #parallelisation. Hopefully we’ll do it again sometime, but not too often so that we can get some work done as well.