My first coffee machine was La Marzocco and my first espresso machine was BEZZERA.

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The first espresso machine was BEZZERA.

The first horizontal boiler design coffee machine is La Marzocco

La Marzocco was founded in 1927 by the Piero Bambi family located in Florence, Italy, who are passionate about perfect coffee machine craftsmanship. La Marzocco was originally the name of a stone lion in Signoria Square in Florence. It was carved by Donatello in the 15th century. La Marzocco was named after the stone lion and also expressed the exquisite craftsmanship of his machine.

Although La Marzocco is the business of the Piero Bambi family in Italy, its factory is very small, relying only on hand-made and exquisite craftsmanship to serve our customers.

But what made La Marzocco famous is not Italian and Italian coffee, but Starbucks coffee. Why do you say that?

At that time, there was an American Kent Bakke (that is, the general manager of the United States), who opened a small restaurant in Seattle. He also changed hands from someone else. There was an old-fashioned Victoria Arduino in the store. Under such circumstances, he took an exam to understand the Italian-style coffee machine. By disassembling, assembling, repairing, and self-taught how the Italian machine works, he slowly mastered various machine technologies (the predecessor of GEEK).

Although Kent Bakke knows coffee machines very well, he is not an expert at running a restaurant. After finishing the restaurant business, he decided to switch to a coffee machine. In 1978, he and his friends came to Italy to visit various Italian coffee factories, and met the two brothers Bruno and Giuseppe Bambi, the founder of La Marzocco. He appreciated La Marzocco's products very much and decided to introduce him to the United States. At that time, La Marzocco was not so popular, and the mainstream of coffee in the United States was still mainly filter. The coffee machine was not a mainstream popular product, and Kent Bakke worked hard for a year to sell a coffee machine-as he later recalled.

But the advent of Starbucks changed everything. When the Faema machine in Starbucks stores malfunctioned, an La Marzocco rescue machine was urgently called to make La Marzocco's journey to the United States begin to change. Starbucks coffee operators fell in love with this machine because the La Marzocco prepreg head infiltrated the coffee powder more fully before brewing, resulting in a more satisfactory concentrated flavor (a situation that still existed in Starbucks in China in 2009).

On the recommendation of Starbucks baristas, La Marzocco began to enter the Starbucks bar and expand its product share in the United States, while La Marzocco further introduced the then state-of-the-art Linea in 1990, which was designed with double boilers and foamed with great power to deal with Americans who like to drink fresh milk lattes, and the space under the head is high enough to hold Starbucks 12 or 16 ounce cups. The Linea has become standard at Starbucks. With the expansion of the Starbucks industry and the addition of stores, the number of coffee machines ordered is in the hundreds, and the La Marzocco handmade and assembled by La Marzocco simply cannot handle it.

When Bakke began to place additional orders with Italy, the Bambi family said that unless you buy the factory, there are no plans to increase production capacity. So in 1994, Bakke joined a group of investors to buy a 90 per cent stake in La Marzocco and set up a new plant in Ballard to expand capacity. The new plant can produce 140 coffee machines a month, half of which are for Starbucks. Unexpectedly, because Starbucks was too successful and its stores expanded too fast, after 2000 years of semi-automatic machines combined with industrial upgrading, Starbucks bought another Italian coffee machine factory for global development strategy and began to switch to fully automatic coffee machines. since then, Starbucks has lost the charm of boutique coffee.

But precisely because Starbucks gave up the La Marzocco, the second-hand Linea that went out of the market was taken over by the newly emerging "third wave" independent cafes to make wonderful coffee, and the La Marzocco began to become an indicator luxury model. Piero, the son of the founder of La Marzocco, said in an interview with the media: "what we do is a Ferrari in the coffee machine, and you can taste the difference in the coffee."

The Bombi brothers founded La Marzocco in 1927. When they entered the coffee machine market, it was popular for vertical models, tall cones with vertical boilers, to press water into coffee powder with the help of vapor pressure. However, due to the low pressure, the squeezed coffee is more like the follicular coffee we drink today, rather than the usual espresso.

The horizontal boiler created by Bambis is placed in an extended metal shell. The name of the first generation of products is Marus. For separate coffee cartridges, the bar counter can replace the ground coffee powder, and the machine level arrangement also allows different bar players to work in front of the machine at the same time, shortening the waiting time. At the top of the horizontal boiler, there can even be room for prepared cups and heating. Horizontal boilers were patented in 1939 and these designs are now standard in the industry.

In 1970, Piero Bambi, the son of one of the founders Giuseppe Bambi, became involved in the design and developed the GS machine. GS was the first coffee maker with two separate boilers: one steam boiler and the other for brewing coffee. GS is Gruppo Saturo: the principle is to extend the head directly to the boiler to form a continuous cooking system that allows hot water to circulate continuously to maintain a fixed temperature. Over the past generation, coffee maker manufacturers have worked hard to keep the water temperature at 93 degrees C, which has finally been achieved. La Marzocco's GS water-filled head was also the first design that won Starbucks' favor.

To this day, La Marzocco still adheres to the tradition of manual manufacturing and assembly. GB5 and Strada launched after 2005, the new version of Linea PB (Piero Bambi) commemorating the large-scale use of Linea by Starbucks, and GS3 designed for the home market, each coffee machine has brought a surprise to the coffee industry. At present, the annual production of La Marzocco is only about 7000 units, which is still quite small compared with other coffee maker makers, but far more than was given to Starbucks that year.