(bright upbeat music) - Today, we're gonna talk about this, the ZPM Nocturn. Now, this was a Kickstarter project, it had 1,500 backers and not a single unit was delivered. Now, I didn't think it existed, but it turns out one of
my Patreon supporters had one of the beta-testing units, and he got in touch and
said, "Did I want to buy it?" And yes, yes I did. Now, the story of ZPM is interesting, but what's more interesting to me is that you can draw a line
from the failure of ZPM through to the creation of what I think is probably the most influential espresso
machines in the last decade, a machine that's kind of revolutionized our understanding of espresso, the Decent DE1. Now before you ask, yes, it does work, and yes, we are gonna make
some espresso with it. But let me give you the backstory on ZPM. The Kickstarter campaign launched back on December 11th, 2011, and this was back in the day when videos were kind of charming and not necessarily big budget affairs. Their plan was to use a bunch
of off-the-shelf components combined with a couple of
their own bespoke pieces, I think their own thermoblock
design and group head design, to create a very technically
capable espresso machine that was very, very cheap. Their proposed pricing
for Kickstarter was $200 for this unit, which was a ridiculous price. Now, the planned retail would be $400, but either way, for the kind of features
they were offering, this was a very, very
compelling proposition. When the Kickstarter finally closed, they had raised $370,000. Now in, in terms of modern Kickstarters, that's not that much money, but at the time this was the sixth
highest funded Kickstarter in its history. Turns out their pricing was perhaps not sustainable. Something we do talk about on this channel is the challenge of
manufacturers scaling up what they're doing, and I think people often
underestimate how difficult it is to go from some kind of fully functional prototypes, which is essentially what this is, through to mass manufacturing thousands of units. I don't think they had
the skill necessarily, I don't think they had the
money necessarily to do it. Now, I'm not trying to
pick over the bones of it, I just think they were
very passionate founders who were perhaps in way over their heads. The project didn't fail quickly. In fact, it was October, 2015, nearly four years after launching, that they posted their
final update to Kickstarter. And when they had shared the fact that the company had ultimately failed and they would not be shipping units, the response from their customer base, from their community, was angry. So angry in fact, that it generated enough
interest for the New York Times to come and write a piece
about ZPM and its community. Now, if you read the article and it is linked in the
description down below, towards the end of the piece, you were introduced to a new
character in all of this, that of John Buckman. Now John, you may know as the founder, the creator of the
Decent Espresso machine. And in the piece, he's in talks with ZPM to kind of buy the
remnants of the company. Seeing as John is in London right now, I thought I would just
go and ask him in person about how his interactions
and experience with ZPM maybe influenced his creation of the DE1. - So firstly, I saw the ZPM video and I felt like it was gonna be quite
hard for me to figure out how to make espresso, 'cause I had no guide. And when I saw this video
of these two nerdy guys and they were both technologists, and I'm a technologist, and I thought "I'm gonna trust them to be
my guides into espresso." And they told me what grinder to by, which was great, 'cause I
didn't know that either. While they were falling apart, my businesses were falling apart too. I had a music business and
a book swapping business, and that was all cratering, and I was looking for
something else to do. They, one day, sent an email out saying, "We can't ship, we've run out
money, we're really sorry." At which point, I happen to be in California, I give them a call. I say, "Hello, it sounds like you need
a little bit of money." 'Cause they said, "We're so
close to the finish line, we just need another
million." or something, I don't remember what the number was. And I thought, "Okay, well I can write that check, and take over, and be a little
bit of adult supervision." They brought the ZPM over with Blue Bottle beans, and they made me a quite good espresso. And so, there it was, working, making good coffee. The next thing I did was call up a friend in Seattle, because I happened to know
La Marzocco, and Slayer, and Synesso are up in Seattle. And Bill Crossland, who'd
been involved with the GS3, was one of the people who
was willing to talk to me. Now, he makes the machine called the CC1, and what Bill said is, "Let me show you, kid, what the economics are of espresso." And he laid it all out to me and he said, "There's just no way you're gonna make a
machine better than mine, at a cheaper price." "What if I just sell direct, then could I spend more money to make a better machine?" And he said, "If you're willing to sell direct only, yes, you can make a better machine." So, Bill essentially sent
me in that direction, and he also said, "Don't buy ZPM, because it'll never get
safety certification." And that was just him, his background, "You're just
gonna die on that altar." And in fact they were dying on that altar, that's what they were talking about, was the safety certification
was never gonna happen. But the real birth of Decent Espresso is finding that, I think
there's a market for, what I call at the time, Seattle meet Italy. So, Italian espresso, which is what I liked at the time, but with a sort of
Seattle spin of high tech, app, that sort of thing. And that would hopefully
reduce the complexity of making good espresso. And then the second part, which was the launch of Decent Espresso, is everyone telling me, "For the amount you will spend
to make ZPM come to market, you can start from scratch with people who've made espresso machines before, and you won't have any of their problems." But, of course, I had new problems, but that's why I went in a new direction. Because I decided to start from scratch and make my own machine, the ZPM guys said, "Hey, wait a second." "We've shown you everything, you need to cut us in here." And they're absolutely right, right. I saw this schematics, the software, I saw everything, and that was influencing the decisions I was making. So, it took a while, but we got to a point where they licensed their
intellectual property to us so we could choose to
use, it if we wanted to, in exchange for some money, and most importantly, a coupon to all the backers of ZPM that they could apply in the next three years to Decent. It took me about nine months to fall out of love with the approach that ZPM were taking. Because I tried the same approach, which is used cheap components, and a bit of software,
and algorithms, PID dust, that little magic fairy dust, PID will solve everything, that didn't work at all. My ambition for a machine that I would sell for $1,000 US well, we had no product. And so, what I thought I
could make for $1,000 US using essentially two Nespresso
machines bolted together, would not make good coffee. So, this became now a
multi-year R&D project. And it turned out that heating on demand is incredibly inaccurate on espresso. And so, we had to come
up with new technologies to deal with that. What I realized was, that we had no idea how to make espresso good with light roast beans. That was actually the
problem I wanted to solve. I had this very strong feeling that the entire espresso
industry was pre-scientific. They don't measure anything, they don't create testable hypotheses. And testable hypotheses and measurement are the basis of science. And we had no idea what
pressure flow and temperature would make delicious light-roasted coffee. So, let's just make sure that it can do anything. And in the computer world, we
talk about Turing machines, which is a computer that
can run any software. The idea behind the Decent was to make a Turing-compliant espresso machine. So, an espresso machine that could do any pressure, any flow, any temperature, because we have no idea what's gonna work. In so doing, it became quite expensive to make, and became a much harder project, but it also became much more interesting. So what ZPM really did for me, is get me interested, get my team together, and look at cheap components, and see what we could do with cheap components
to make good espresso. And it turns out, that if
you spend millions of dollars and develop all this
intellectual property, you can actually take the
inexpensive components and get them to do your bidding. - And so that is how we go
from the ZPM to the DE1, very different approaches, but an interesting connecting
point between the two. And I cannot understate just how influential this thing has been. By letting us track
everything, measure everything our understanding of espresso has fundamentally changed how we see flow, how we
think about channeling, all of that stuff has been revolutionized by the DE1. And I think it's fair to call it the most influential machine in a decade. But this is not a review of the DE1, that will happen
eventually on this channel, this is a video about the ZPM. It's finally time to fire this thing up, and see what it's capable of doing. Before we do that though, there is a short ad
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for sponsoring this video. Let's switch it on.
(machine clicks) Every time I turn it on
my heart is in my mouth because I'm terrified I'm
just gonna break this thing and then it'll be gone. You know what I mean? Like it's, I dunno if I could repair this. Someone could, but I couldn't. Anyway, it's on, it's heating up, little
temperature display here. It rockets up in temperature,
which is kind of interesting, which has got a little
thermoblock to heat in there. Now, this is obviously a US machine, that's running on 110V, I've got a chunky transformer
under the bench here to allow me to run this thing on UK power. But while it's heating up, we'll do a quick tour of the machine. It's pretty simple, but there's
a couple of notable things on this particular unit. So, obviously you've got your
display on the front here. It's not a bad display, considering its age and the price point, it's not horrific. It's not touch, that's okay. You've got these control buttons here and this is something I'm
definitely terrified of breaking. They just feel really flimsy and soft, and I have to be very delicate here. Two sturdier buttons, one that says "Start"
and one that says "Mode." So, because it's a thermoblock, if you wanna steam milk, then you'd have to change the temperature of the sort of thermoblock to get steam. So, it can't do both at once. That's kind of it, on
the front panel here, little drip tray, pretty nice. Now, you can see a water tank here. Actually, if I turn this to the side, you can see that the
water tank does not fit, 'cause this would've been a custom part that would've cost a lot of money to make. They didn't get that far. So this is just, I assume some other machine's water tank that sort of fits well enough, but it works. Also worth noting here, you appear to have a mini
USB and an SD card slot. And impressively, we're
actually up to temperature on the front. So, we've got a little
ready symbol at the top. It says 95, 94.9 degrees Celsius, lovely to see it in Celsius, didn't even put that on myself, but the correct temperature display. So, let's get into the menus of this thing because it gives a real insight into how this was gonna work, in terms of what you could program and what you could do with this thing. So, you've got a couple of
pre-programmed options here. You've got single, which shows 93 Celsius, nine bars, 25 seconds. So, 25 seconds says that they're looking
at like a fixed time, not a fixed volume of brewing. A few machines work this way, they'll brew a fixed amount of time, and you would adjust your
grind to get the flow rate that you want, to get the kind of yield you want in that fixed time. Interestingly, the double
pre-programmed here, same temperature, same
pressure, 35 seconds. Which I hope is not suggesting
that a single is just like a double cut earlier, 'cause that would be wrong. You've then got settings, which we can jump into. And then I think you've got
like a more manual thing where it's gonna do the
temperature and pressure that you want, but it won't cut off after a certain amount of time. Settings, is again interesting. So, you can adjust your PID values around a bunch of different stuff. So, if we jump in, obviously your brew temperature and we tap in there. So you can set your proportional gain, you can set your integral gain, or you'll set your derivative gain. I dunno how to program a PID, if I'm totally honest. So, I'm not gonna mess with these values. Now, on the back screen, there's a little bit of
immaturity in this machine. And so, the fact that it
says "Back that ass up." I don't know, I don't think you should build that into a daily espresso machine, it just feels kind of weird. It just feels a little bit
childish, if I'm honest. It's not that I'm against immaturity, but you know. I don't know, it's just
a weird little thing. I don't know if it would've
made it to production if it was just for the
beta units or something, but there it is. We should make some coffee. Pour, I think we're
just gonna pour manual, I think that's a good idea. I'm gonna brew it 94, I think. And I'm gonna brew at eight bars, 'cause why not? And there it is, it's
programmed very quickly. So, from a programming perspective, this is kind of a joy to use, this really is. But can it make good coffee? So, let's brew and this is interesting. (machine surges) So, right now it's kind
of getting prepped. You can see negative pressure, it's seemingly filling
the hydraulic circuit, getting ready, timer reads zero still. (machine continues to surge) Once we switch to positive pressure, (machine hums) okay, timer's on. Only about four bars of pre-infusion, and then it's gonna really spike it up. (machine continues to hum) (machine surges) So it's overshot there, so we're gonna need some
PID control work done. Drops back down to about
eight bars, which is good. (machine surges) Temperature, a little high. (machine continues to surge) Now it pulled a little
longer than I'd want, but I think it's still worth tasting. Now, actually, just on the
temperature gauge here, it's dropped down to
like 80 degrees Celsius. So, I wonder if it's got a bit
of a declining profile here with the heating stuff. Now some of you, like me, were you a backer? Watching this, are you thinking "Did I miss out or does it suck?" Let's find out. It's got a weird acidity to it that makes me feel like
the brew temperature is not quite right. Actually, we could probably test that. We do have a Scace device that we can test the brew temperature with and see what it's actually doing, in terms of temperature
and pressure delivered onto the puck. Maybe we should do that. Let's repeat this, and actually see what's happening inside the machine versus what it's telling us it's happening. Okay, so we've got a Scace
2 device set up here. This has a temperature probe inside there and a flow restrictor to mimic
the flow rate of an espresso that's running to this laptop. You can, sort of, in a second, see what this sort of
screen recording of this is. You also have a pressure gauge here, which is the sort of pressure, including the loss of
pressure through the puck. So typically, this would read about a bar lower than you would see at a pump. So, if it was nine bars at the pump, you'd see eight at the group head, 'cause you're losing
about a bar of pressure through the cake. Anyway, let's see what happens when we pull a shot. (machine humming) So we're coming up to pressure here, coming way up. Now, that's quite a big discrepancy. (machine humming and hissing) Oh, that's interesting. So looking at the brew temperature, it briefly spikes to about 91 degrees Celsius and then just crashes back down really, really quickly. And so, it's brewing way below,
sort of, target temperature almost the entire time. There's a little leakage here, a pressure issue here. I think there's a problem
with the grouphead solenoid. We'll touch on that in just a second. Hang on, let me stop this. Now, this was a beta testing
unit that was out in the wild. So, this has been sort
of shipped, so to speak, to somebody to test. And so, you'd expect it to perform a little bit more within spec than it was. So what you were seeing
was it was thinking it was delivering about
nine bars of pressure. What you were seeing at the puck though, was substantially below what you'd expect. The temperature piece though, really, really just miles away. And so, I don't know at this point, if it just needs its settings tweaked, but that kind of makes me
a little hesitant to think that's the problem, that's the issue, or if maybe it was never ever gonna do what they really needed it to do. It's an interesting artifact of its time. It's definitely got some
interesting ideas in there. It's a sad story that
they didn't get to deliver what they wanted to deliver. But I'm left wondering if they were ever gonna deliver something that would've lived up to the expectations of the community and to the sort of
technical expectations of really good, accurate espresso brewing? Now to caveat myself, again,
and over, and over again, this has sat, you know, not making much coffee
for quite a long time. I think there's something trapped inside the grouphead solenoid. That's a little sort of
electromagnetic valve that pulls a piston up and down to control a three-way valve, and sometimes stuff gets trapped in there causing a kind of leak of pressure from the boiler itself,
sort of through the system, and you'll see the group
head dripping sometimes. So, this is not maybe
in peak, peak condition, but what its sensors are showing versus what we're reading with these sort of mechanical readings or accurate readings of temperature are quite a long way apart. And that would be a huge concern for me, even if the maths was a little better, at staying on target when it was supposed to a
little bit more accurately, it just seems to not really
know what it's doing, in that particular regard. And I dunno why that may be the case, I don't know if that's bad build, if that's bad componentry, if that's something else, they're using cheap parts
by their own admission, maybe that was the issue. There's lots I like about this, I like the form of it. I think it looks kind of cute, it's boxy in a charming way. I like the interface, it's simple, it let me
do what I needed to do, but I'm not sure it delivered. I don't wanna savage this, this is flawed, it's not working the way it should, but it's really interesting. And it will go to one of my Patreon supporters, because Patreon lets me
kind of have a budget to go and acquire these things, test these things, and make these videos, and I'm very grateful to them. So, this will be going into
one of them in a giveaway soon. But I'd love to hear your thoughts, were you a ZPM backer? How do you feel now knowing that for your $200, you may not have got what you wanted? I'd love to hear from you, whether you backed it or not, down in the comments below. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day.
