The Cafelat Robot is a manual lever espresso maker. Aluminium body, stainless steel everywhere else, an FDA-approved silicone piston seal, and nothing else inside it. 2.8 kg. Completely plastic free. Six to seven bar, by hand.
No pump. No boiler. No electronics.
Hot water from your kettle, straight into a 58 mm basket.
The basket is the brewing chamber. Water off the boil settles to about 95 °C.
Press the arms down. The piston does what a pump would do.
Six to seven bar — where lever machines actually extract.
32 g out of 16 g in. Real espresso.
Every figure below is Cafelat's own. The Robot has no heating element and no pump, so two of them — water temperature and extraction pressure — depend on what you do with it, and both are given as the range the machine actually works in rather than as a single flattering number.
| Filter basket | 58 mm, the same size as professional semi-automatic machines |
|---|---|
| Baskets supplied | Professional basket for fresh ground coffee; pressurised double-wall basket for pre-ground |
| Portafilter | Bottomless, with spouts available |
| Extraction pressure | 6–7 bar recommended; 8 bar maximum |
| Water into the basket | About 95 °C, from water just off the boil |
| Coffee out of the basket | Up to 88 °C |
| Ratio | 16 g in to 32 g out, extending to 40–45 g |
| Pressure gauge | Reads from inside the basket. Barista model only |
| Body and bases | Aluminium |
|---|---|
| All other parts | Stainless steel |
| Piston seal | FDA-approved silicone |
| Plastic content | None |
| Tamper | One-piece stainless steel, tapered walls, machined to the basket |
| Weight | Approx. 2.8 kg (6.2 lb), including the tamper |
| Protection | Design registered. The Barista version is patent pending |
The body is powder-coated over aluminium. The arms, basket and tamper are polished stainless steel on every one of them.
Availability changes. The current list is on the store. See what is in stock.
Work in the 5 to 8 bar range. It is tempting to max the gauge out; do not. Cafelat routinely test the machine well past 14 bar, but only for a moment, and while the stainless arms will take whatever you give them, the body is aluminium and you risk breaking it.
Without a gauge, put a bathroom scale under the machine and pull a shot. 18 kg (40 lb) on the scale is roughly 7 to 8 bar, and that is as hard as you should press.
Press the arms straight down, evenly, with both hands. Do not squeeze the arms against the legs for extra leverage — that is what breaks machines.
Paul Pratt started as a barista in 1995, opened his first retail stores in 1997 at 23, began importing La Marzocco into Hong Kong and Macau a year later, and built a roasting facility in 2003. He is best known in the trade for machine maintenance and for training La Marzocco technicians.
He owns around thirty espresso machines, most of them La Marzocco, dating from the 1950s to the present, and rebuilds each one using as much of the original machine as possible — down to refurbishing the factory screws. The 6 to 7 bar figure on this page comes from measuring traditional lever machines in that collection.
The Robot was drawn by Karina Mencke, a designer based in Copenhagen, who has designed every Cafelat product since the company started in 2008.
Pull it yourself.