The Eagle One
That is the Eagle One.. Now warning gon na tell you right from the start.. This is a project that Ive been involved in for years now, from its inception. Ive been incredibly involved in it., I would have been traveling the world talking about it, this year., So I could not have more of a bias, and you should know that now., But I think its an interesting project – and I kind of wan na talk about it, not necessarily about the machine, but about the kind of bigger. Why of creating something new. Cause thats, really an interesting question., Its an interesting challenge.. If you build a new machine, you start with a blank piece of paper.. You can build anything, you want., You can create any new technology, you want.! So how do you pick? How do you pick the things that are important? How do you decide And thats kind of what I wan na cover. And all of it for me starts with something pretty simple.? It starts with a design brief.. A design brief for me starts with an audience who youre building this for and then its about identifying a problem of theirs worth solving.. To me, innovation is that its about solving a problem in a new way.. You can create new coffee machine technology and go in search of a problem, but thats not innovation., Thats, more akin to me to novelty. So Im interested in innovation. Im interested in problem solving.
. I worked with Victoria Arduino on this project and Ive worked with them or their parent company. Now for quite a long time.. Nearly 10 years I think. I got involved as a kind of a late addition to the team that was developing and testing the Mythos One grinder.. I then went on to work with them on the Black Eagle Nespresso machine., And this is the third project with them that Ive worked on.. I think the Black Eagle is are pretty good example of looking at an audience and try to pick a problem. And with that machine the audience was the obsessives of specialty coffee. People who understood how difficult it was to do espresso, incredibly well and incredibly consistently., And They were people whod been fighting with little drip, tray scales, you know breaking them all the time and just knowing what they needed, but having an issue in being able to have it., And so the Black Eagle was very much built around lets solve that problem. Lets Integrate scales into the machine. Lets: have it be incredibly stable, easy to control. Lets? Have it look good, thats kind of part of the process too., But it was about solving a problem for that audience.. What I think is interesting is that audience has changed. Specialty. Coffee has changed. Its everywhere, now. Its in every city., Its not just a kind of London thing. Melbourne thing, Tokyo thing, New York, thing. Its every city., Its most urban areas, its small towns.
Specialty, has spread everywhere. And historically, it had really been in consuming countries. But now well thats changed too.. There are many producing countries that have vibrant specialty coffee cultures that are as interesting as anything anywhere in the world., So its a much much much broader umbrella. The people who care about coffee. Its a much larger group. And with a larger audience, well thats, good and bad. Its unlikely that they will have shared problems., But it turns out. I think that everyone has a little bit of a shared problem.. Everyone has something worth worrying: about. And Im gon na use, one word to define it. And you might roll your eyes when you hear the word but Ill bring you back.. The word is sustainability.. I get it. I get it. Its an overused word., Its a word that is used to death., But I just wan na use a very basic definition of it to sort of focus on how Im thinking about the problem.. The basic definition is the ability to sustain the ability to keep going.. Is it able to perpetuate itself And thats a challenge from a number of perspectives., Two main ones really. The first place your brain probably went to was the environment.. Our impact on the environment makes our existence on this planet unsustainable. And Im not interested in arguing that., But there is another kind of sustainability that is very relevant to the coffee industry and that is financial sustainability.
. Can the businesses that sell coffee to you every day that do a great job? Can they sustain? Are they sustainable businesses And in both of those things, theres a common factor.? We are wasteful., We are wasteful in a multitude of ways and that impacts the environment and that impacts the health of the business that is wasteful. And Im very interested in that particular problem being less wasteful., And that became the big primary goal of this project. How do we become less wasteful Now in the past, wed worked on energy efficiency, but this time around we were really able to push it forward. Quite a long way. Going back to the Black Eagle, the way that that thing heated water was kind of interesting.. It was called a T3 system. Ill, be quick about this dont worry.. You had a heat exchanger that kind of preheated the water before it went into a brew boiler. That brought it up to your desired brew. Temperature lets say: 94 degrees, Celsius. And then the third stage of heating was actually the grouphead itself. In these machines. The physical grouphead weighs about 4 12 kilos and they insulated it and put a heater inside it and a thermocouple, so that would be maintained also at 94 degrees Celsius.. So between the boiler and the coffee, there was no opportunity for the water to be a different temperature. And, as a result, you had a ton of consistency and it was a very flat line in terms of temperature.
. What we worked out relatively early actually is that the temperature of the grouphead is way more important than the temperature of the boiler., Because youve got this 4 12 kilos of metal. Your brew water that youre actually gon na use well its only maybe 70 grams of liquid., So even if its slightly lower in temperature itll absorb heat from that big thermal mass of the grouphead and itll come up to the groupheads temperature before heating, the coffee. We Took this as far as we could so we shrank the brew boiler down as small as we could.. It went from being about a liter to down to like 150 200 mils. The size of those disappointing cans of Cola that you used to get on airplanes. That who was ever satisfied by those those teeny, little cans, Im sure youll, agree a tiny amount of liquid. And because youre not preheating the heater either. This small boiler will take it from cold to nearly perfect brew temperature and then the grouphead kind of does the rest, and you have in that a huge energy saving.. But for me one solution is not enough.. Youve got to look at an entire system and see where else you can maybe gain something. And theres little gains in funny places.. These machines all have an auto flush.. When you pull a shot, if you take the grouphead out, it will flush the exact minimum amount of water necessary to clean the screen and no more.
Because I know over the years of being a barista or sort of working on coffee bars Ill flush, a grouphead Between every single shot, but I will get distracted sometimes and dump out way more water than I probably needed to. And over the course of 500 drinks a day you can waste staggering amounts of water. In London, thats water that youve had to pay to buy firstly.. Secondly, youve had to pay to treat through reverse osmosis, which has quadrupled the price essentially. And then youve paid to heat it up and then youve dumped it down a drain, box. Its a staggering waste of energy and its so unnecessary, and this is where robots are Better than people., So I love that., But we could go further still. And this one is so ridiculous. But I completely love it.. We talked about the idea and then we tested it and our minds were kind of blown. Inside the drain box, where all your hot water waste goes theres a heat exchanger and it pulls the heat out of your drain box and uses it to preheat. Your brew. Water. There is no thermal waste here or as little as possible.. It turns out. You can get up to 8 efficiency by doing it. This way., It started out as a kind of this wont work, but we should try it. Wouldnt, it be fun And it turned out to be really quite valuable. Yeah. I cant benchmark against other name brands, but against what I guess would be a popular choice.
It uses about 13 less energy to make the same number of drinks. Thats. Really, I think a good indication of what were trying to do here and the kind of thinking here., Obviously parts inside a highly recyclable and theres been a good amount of thought on materials. Choice inside the machine., The one other thing I wan na talk about just quickly that Im very passionate about as part of this machine is a kind of part of the styling.. Now its designed to look very clean, very minimal., Its designed to look good on any coffee bar. Its easy, I think, to build a machine with almost too much character. That can look odd in a bunch of places as much as it looks perfect in a bunch of places.. Really. The goal here was to be as clean and as minimal and actually as small as is possible without compromising the kind of barista side experience.. But more than that people love to customize coffee machines. And I get it. Its a beautiful thing and you can make it even more beautiful with customization. The problem is, you can easily end up spending 50, more of the cost of the machine on customizing it., And I dont think thats cool.. I dont think it should cost a fortune to customize machines, so weve built it with customization in mind., Like the panels come off real easily theyre, really easy to replace with other materials. The back panel isnt, actually the back panel.
So you can use almost any material there and not worry about heat or that kind of stuff., So its built to be super easy to cheaply customize and give you a lot of flexibility about materials. Choices. And people are kind of using some cool stuff, some highly recycled, stuff. Theyre already having fun with that., And there are other things that I wan na talk about.. I think its good that weve gotten rid of mechanical steam valves and then have electric solenoids.. I think theres better longevity easier to change. Its a different experience, but I think a better experience ultimately. I dont wan na get into like a specs list or a features list or that kind of stuff.. I wan na talk about what were trying to do and why Im so concerned about that., Because even before the pandemic, sustainability was – and quite rightly, was a big topic of discussion and thats, both environmental as well as financial.. The coffee industry became a target for governments around the world, really as a focal point of waste.. You know the paper cup wastes story ran and ran and ran all over the world.. No one talks about the amount of paper waste generated by online delivery., But hey, look at coffee shops. Look how messy they are.. It was a concern and its a fair concern.. I think its disproportionate, but its still a fair concern, but thats just one piece of that., But alongside that we were already at a point of massive financial pressure.
. There were way too many coffee shops around the world. That was way too much. Competition and surviving was gon na be difficult., And then you laid a pandemic across that, and survival became incredibly difficult for almost everyone in the market. Ive said this before, and itll probably continue to be true. Its never been harder to run a coffee shop than it Is now., But I want people to succeed and so Im very interested in working towards building tools that help businesses succeed. A machine should have everything you need to serve great coffee and kind of nothing more.. It should be as efficient as possible, but you dont wan na add so many features that you start to bloat the price, because Ive heard loud and clear from people in many producing countries who feel theyre kind of priced out of coffee, innovation.. The most interesting coffee machines are often the most expensive and that might work that might work in London or LA or Melbourne, but maybe it doesnt work as effectively in Jakarta or Mexico City. Working kind of remotely on a project like this is interesting.. I would travel to Italy occasionally and wed, look at prototypes and wed argue about panel sizes or how to shrink a grouphead or get a display into the grouphead and have it look really good. Angles of steam ones, all of that kind of stuff.. And then I would go away and theyd build things and Id come back and it would evolve in that kind of a way.
And honestly theyre doing all of the hard work.. I would just come in and get to complain for a little bit and theyd be very tolerant of me and then Id leave again and wed continue. Its a strange journey, but Im very pleased with the result.. So thats the Eagle One project. Its been a lot of fun.. We launched it last year as part of Design Week in the Saatchi Gallery in London, and that was a cool event to get to do.. And then, obviously we took it to Host in Milan, where most people saw it for the first time. And obviously its been a weird year this year, but its just been very exciting to bring something to market. But thats. All I wan na say.. I just wanted to talk about the process and the thinking behind, creating something new, because I think that is an interesting topic and I hope that you found it interesting too., But I would love to hear thoughts.. Did I miss something as an opportunity for innovation? Did I misread the market? Do you think a different approach would have been better? Do you think a pandemic has moved our minds away from sustainability or has focused it further onto it? Have you got one? Are you enjoying it and having a good time? I would love to hear from all of you down in the comments below but for now Ill say.