Photos from Bramah Museum tour

On 21 June 2002 a handful of coffeephiles met together to tour London's Bramah Coffee and Tea Museum. (A discussion of that tour and subsequent meet with Bramah can be found on the Usenet newsgroup alt.coffee.) The group included me, my wife Ann and son Mathias; Ken Wilson (organiser - thanks Ken!); Prof. Brian L. Gomes da Costa; Dave Newton and his gf Flo; and Tony Terlecki. (Conspicuous by their absence were the several other UK group regulars who seemed so keen last April - come on, if I can travel 8000 miles to see this place you can suffer an hour on the train!)

As promised in that discussion, here are some photos. (Apologies for the photo quality, my scanner is not terribly good and I've made no attempt at touching up the photos or correcting the color.)

You can click on any photo (except the first) for a larger (usually 150-200k) version.

Ideally I'd have a photo of the facade of the museum here, but I don't.

Instead, this photo of a little calendar - not in the museum, from my wall at home - announcing the date of the visit.

Here's a whole row of machines, mainly Gaggias in the foreground.

The obvious lack of pump machines prompted Brian's questions about same.

A really lovely little Gaggia, many of us had no difficulty imagining it on our counters at home.

The machine on its right is another small Gaggia.

That's a fuzzy Dave N. in the distant background.

A classic Gaggia 2-grouper.

Sorry about the photo, the autofocus was supposed to focus on the 'Gaggia' letters, not Tony's face.

Ken at the controls of an old Victoria Arduino. Bits started falling off a few seconds later.

Note the perforated disks in place of a conventional drip tray. These disks spin like the seat of an old-fashioned piano stool, increasing or decreasing the group clearance as desired. A lovely feature - why isn't this on every machine now made?

The museum has a couple of nice Victoria Arduinos. Here my ignorance of coffee machine history was made evident: despite the Italian name, I'd always assumed that VA was a French company (perhaps because I'd seen so many French adverts for the machines). However, these machines were made in Torino.

Same machine from the other side. Tony is evidently quite surprised by what he sees.

Brian, less impressed, appears to be reading a newspaper.

Here's a quiz - identify the following:

Balance vacuum pots (there are several in this photo but I missed some of the best of them).
Bialetti moka pots.
An Atomic moka pot.
A Cona coffee maker.
A Philips Gourmet coffee maker.
A Gaggia Baby capuccino maker.
A Gaggia lever espresso maker.
Brian's left arm.
Travel moka pot set.
A Morphy Richards "espresso machine".
A kitchen timer cleverly disguised as a coffeemaker. (Likely makes better espresso than the machine in #10)

A rather pretty Pavoni espresso (really, steam) machine.

We had some technical questions about the operation of this one, which I can't remember now - something about there being more drain lines than one would expect.

That thing that looks like a cannon upended is a manual grinder, as is the device to its right. Just to the left is a relatively nondescript electric grinder.

Ken is looking over a display of packaged coffees from around the world. This was a fairly idiosyncratic collection; I recall several bags from Molokai, for example, while none from Kona. Mainly Euro-supermarked brands, such as Douwe Egberts.

Brian is examining at a nifty dual grinder (see below).

This is a nifty double grinder. Two different kinds of beans go into the two hoppers (the metal globes), then a system of levers determines which one actually feeds the grinder, and where the ground coffee goes (there are two drawers under the machine, coffee can be directed into either).

Ken however seems to think this is a Van de Graf electrostatic generator; what, no spark?

Dave N. in foreground.

From the colors, this grinder is evidently designed for grinding your holiday beans.

Even if you're not as short as my son Mathias, dropping beans into the tall funnel has to be an awkward affair.

Here's the roaster that goes with the grinder above. Gas fired, hand cranked.

Convenient to have your coffee plants growing right there between the roaster and the grinder!

Probat sample roaster, circa 1990.

It looked like it had seen some recent use, though certainly not at the museum or cafe.

Somehow this struck me as a slightly strange item to display: no explanatory labels, so a person wandering off the street would either not understand what it was, or would wonder why anyone would want such a big fancy roaster with such a relatively small capacity.

Nice color, though.

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