Ninth Bar — Dana Reyes, proprietor
Nine bar is the target. Most machines miss it, and nobody told them.
I spent eleven years in a roaster's service department before opening this bench. Somewhere around four thousand machines came across it — cafés, offices, and a lot of very expensive kitchen counters.
The thing that surprised me most in that job was how many machines were never broken. They were out of adjustment, or scaled, or running an over-pressure valve nobody had ever set. A machine at 12 bar makes bad coffee for years and never once fails, so nobody calls anybody, and the owner slowly decides they don't like espresso.
That's most of what I do here: put a gauge on it, find out what it's actually doing, and bring it back to where it was designed to run.
Record
Eleven years, one bench.
One tech means you talk to the person holding the tools. It also means I take fewer machines at once, which is why the schedule is what it is.
- Trade since
- 2015
- Machines serviced
- ≈ 4,000
- Bench opened
- 2021, SE Portland
- Café accounts
- 34 on standing service
- Certifications
- La Marzocco & Nuova Simonelli factory training
- Insured to
- $25,000 per machine in custody
Method
Readings, then parts. Never the other way round.
Measure before opening
A pressure gauge in the portafilter and a thermocouple in the group tell me more in two minutes than an hour of disassembly. Every machine gets both before a panel comes off.
Water first
Roughly two thirds of what arrives here is a water problem wearing a costume. I test your water hardness as part of diagnosis and tell you what filtration is worth buying — I don't sell it.
Written numbers
Every machine leaves with a sheet: brew pressure, group temperature at 30 seconds, flow rate, and the readings from before the work. You can hold me to them.
Honest write-offs
Some machines aren't worth fixing. When the parts cost more than a good used replacement, I say so and charge you the diagnosis, not the repair.
Equipment
What's actually on the bench.
None of this is exotic. It's just the difference between knowing what a machine is doing and guessing at it.
- Scace device and portafilter gauge — measures brew pressure and group temperature at the puck, where it matters, instead of at the boiler.
- Ultrasonic tank — strips scale and coffee oil out of jets, screens and valve bodies without wire brushes chewing up the seats.
- Flow meter and refractometer — for setting pumps and checking that a repair changed the shot, not just the noise.
- Small lathe — for truing spouts and making the shims and bushings that stopped being available in 2009.
- Hardness and TDS kit — every intake gets a water test, because the answer is usually there.
- A stocked gasket wall — group gaskets, boiler seals and O-rings for the common machines, so a routine service doesn't wait a week on shipping.
Straight answers
Things I'll tell you that don't make me money.
Your grinder is a more common cause of bad espresso than your machine, and burrs are cheaper than a service. If your shots are inconsistent and your gauge reads 9 bar, start there.
Descaling powder from the supermarket is fine for most home machines. You do not need the branded sachet at four times the price, and you should not use vinegar on a brass boiler.
If your machine is under warranty, take it to the dealer. I'll happily tell you what I think is wrong so you can walk in knowing, but let them pay for it.