[As published in July/August BayBuzz magazine.]
A cyclone, a baby, and the story of Newton Espresso.
“You want about 9 or 10 bars for a good espresso,” Alan informs me.
Coffee has a culture, and its own language. I drink but don’t speak it, whereas Alan and Hayden are fluent. Hayden Maunsell and Alan Neilson are the inventors of the Newton Espresso, a manual – non-electric – lever coffee machine they invented here in the Bay.
The ‘bars’ Alan is referring to are a measure of pressure, with one bar equalling 14.5psi. That’s about 150psi per cup, which as I watch Alan pulling the piston rod lever to make me a perfect long black, looks like a bit of effort, but it’s nothing to a true aficionado for whom nothing appears too much trouble in search of the perfect brew.
The discussion moves onto grind sizes and weight, and coffee crema which has a pattern that looks a little bit like a Cheetah’s coat if you get it just right.
It’s all quite technical and I wish I had paid more attention in physics. But temperature and pressure over time is how you build a coffee profile, and it’s not to be taken lightly if you like your coffee. Hayden’s bringing me up to speed on the Ross droplet technique, a trick that was unveiled at the world Barista champs, where the beans are sprayed with a fine water mist before being ground so as to stop the particles sticking with static electricity, which would reduce the amount of coffee in each dose.
The ideal temperature for a great espresso is between 92 – 96 degrees, and anything under makes the coffee bitter. Although, somewhat conspiratorially Hayden mentions there’s talk doing the rounds of a new technique for a low temperature espresso under 90 degrees. Scandalous.
And, like I said, quite technical.
Hayden very much likes his coffee which is how the Newton came to pass. After completing a design degree at EIT and adding a masters at AUT, he ended up working for Alan who was in charge of tech at the EIT School of Design.
Hayden’s role at EIT was to maintain machinery like pottery kilns, and the wood and metal shop tools. It didn’t pay that well, and one day he found himself in the cafeteria with enough change in his pocket for either coffee or lunch, but not both. He went for the coffee.
Back in the class he asked Alan if they could make their own coffee machine, and Alan reckoned ‘we could give it a go’. So they did. A kickstarter campaign to launch the Newton reached its $50k goal in an hour, a testament to the craftsmanship and no doubt to the passion of their customers.
“Simple is hard,” says Hayden about design. “It’s easy to add things, much harder to take them away.”
The first Newton, named after the measure of force, went through about ten or twelve iterations before Alan and Hayden were satisfied with the result. Although you get the sense that neither of them are truly satisfied, always on the lookout for improvement.
“You obsess over the details when you design something yourself,” says Hayden, who then gets immediately distracted from the photoshoot to discuss a further refinement with Alan, unwittingly proving the point.
That was back in 2017 and there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. No more so than last February when Gabrielle popped her head in.
“The water was chest height in the workshop,” explains Alan at the considerably drier Twyford facility. “Well waist height on Hayden,” he adds, who is a good head or so taller than his business partner.
Fortunately, while they lost momentum in the cyclone, they were at the end of a sales cycle – making the Newton machine in batches of 50 or 100 – so they managed to relocate to Hayden’s home, out of harm’s way and count themselves amongst the lucky ones.
Gabrielle interrupted their flow but gave them breathing room to develop a new product, the Brua 3, which will be in pre-order phase as you read this. Or sold out if history repeats. It’s a slightly bigger machine and comes with bigger plans.
The immediate goal is to find an Australian distributor for the machine, as they are quite big coffee fans across the ditch. They’ll do this at places like MICE which stands for the Melbourne International Coffee Expo. The Newton already has a strong international base, with nearly 20% of the machines being sold in the US, and thanks to a strong social media presence, about 25 other countries.
Online shopping does have its drawbacks though, and one machine was purchased with deliberate intent to rip off the design. It doesn’t seem to have fazed them. These two look forwards not backwards.
The new model has a bigger basket – a whole extra 7mm in diameter – which I’m assured is quite a big deal, and will be available in bigger numbers due to how the parts are made. They’re in the final phase of manufacture and while Hayden and Alan are gearing up for launch, the pressure is on in other ways too.
As I’m writing this, there’s a newborn son on the way for Hayden and his wife, and no doubt more than a few sleepless nights ahead.
But it won’t be from the caffeine.