During the break, we ventured up to Kingscliff in northern New South Wales, where upon visiting a bookstore, I discovered an old but rather significant project: a hand built coffee machine that actually related back to Boema coffee machines in Sydney.

The machine was from a collection that was built for the CSR Sugar Refinery as a consignment art piece. The contraption was a crazy arrangement of industrial gauges, copper pipes and switch gear, wrapped together with electrical brass buzz bars, all hand built around a vertical boiler. The machine had Boema group heads and internal switch gear and was still in working condition in the café/bookstore.

Seeing this work of art reminded me of the conversation I had with a young New Zealand guy who was the creator of these pieces, when he visited my north coast café 13 years ago. He told me he had the scrap metal rights to the old CSR refinery building in Walsh Bay and used the chunky brass fixtures in his hobby work of building espresso machines. I never got to see the machines, but was fascinated at the time by the story. He had built several machines already in his home town in New Zealand and was well known as a metal sculptor.

I quizzed Greg Gibbs from Boema to see if he knew anything about the machine and creator. Greg could recollect a similar story and said that he had sold enough parts to the same guy for five machines. We thought we were very revolutionary with the project X build, but we obviously were not the first to hand build an espresso machine.

Sam Haymes, the newest owner of the crazy looking machine, bought it privately and heard on the grapevine it came from a sugar mill in Northern Queensland. The Kingscliff bookshop owner loves coffee and was very pleased with his unusual purchase. He took six months to get the machine back to a working state, as it nearly ended up as scrap metal again.

Sam is going to turn his bookstore into a working espresso bar and has plans to make the machine a centrepiece of the business. The coffee machine is very collectable, and it would be interesting to track down the original builder and the other four machines.

The Project X committee will have plenty to chat about this year when they have their third meeting in July to discuss the next phase of the build, which will focus on techniques of extraction. There is a lot of discussion out there in regards to varied pump pressure affecting the taste of espresso coffee during the extraction. This is just one of the many ideas the group are working towards in the Boema X machine.