Decent Espresso, from the lab

What it is

Decent Espresso makes espresso machines with pressure and flow profiling and open software. Its Telegram channel, linked from the company's official website, is written by the founder in the first person, with numbers and photos from the workshop. The description is simply "All things Decent Espresso and beyond". It has about a thousand subscribers and posts a few times a month. The latest post when we checked was from 21 September 2026.

To be upfront: this is a manufacturer's channel, and most posts are about its own machines. But the way it talks about them is unusual for a brand, with test tables, admitted mistakes and links to other people's research.

Why we picked it

It treats coffee as an engineering problem, and that's interesting even if you never plan to buy anything. A few things we saw. A steam wand comparison: the three-hole tip steams milk roughly 25 to 40 percent faster than the default, while a single-hole tip on the most powerful model does worse, because the heater can't shed its own heat fast enough and shuts off for safety. A heater simulator: the team wrote a physics model to answer "how fast can I heat water?" for different wattages and mains voltages. And "The Nine Bar Question", an article on why espresso is traditionally brewed at nine bar, built partly on real customer shots pulled through the Visualizer.coffee API.

There are nice small touches too. The founder writes that ever since reading Edward Tufte's "Envisioning Information" he wanted to see his espresso history as "ghosts from the past", faint lines of previous shots under the current one. That view now exists in the app. Another post covers a profile generator first written by coffee researcher Stéphane Ribes: answer questions about roast level, origin and the flavours you want, and it builds a profile for those beans.

Then there's Bengle, the new machine in development: its first complete espresso, a latte steamed in ten seconds, and R&D photos of an infrared sensor that reads milk temperature without touching the milk.

Where to start

• Find the post on "The Nine Bar Question". It's the meatiest piece in the feed.
• Look at the steam wand test data for a good example of comparing gear honestly.
• Scroll through the summer posts about the app. There's a demo you can try in a browser.
• Check late August, where the founder revisits his "Employees Suck!" talk and shares advice on getting press. Off-topic for coffee, but a good read.

Who it's for

Home baristas who want to know what's going on inside the machine. Engineers and product designers looking for an example of building in the open. Coffee readers who prefer numbers to tasting-note poetry.

Quick answers

Is it just advertising? It's a manufacturer's channel and most posts are about its products. Plenty of it is useful without buying anything, though: test data, write-ups and articles.

How often does it post? A few times a month, sometimes several posts in one day.

Who writes it? The company's founder, in the first person.