I Bought David Lynch s Weird Coffee Maker

Today is a very exciting day. Today, something arrived in the mail, something that I fought hard to get, to win, if you will. Hopefully, a lot of you are familiar with seminal, massively influential director, David Lynch, a man who created incredible television and movies, and was frankly a hair idol to me and many others. David Lynch sadly passed away, and not long afterwards, a bunch of his kind of random personal effects were auctioned off by the family. I gather all his film stuff is going to archive, but this was just a bunch of other stuff. And there were loads of coffee things in there because David Lynch liked coffee. David Lynch had his own coffee brand for a little while. Coffee appears in his work. He's made commercials for coffee. I saw this auction, and I was immediately compelled. Could I own something of David Lynch's? Could I own a David Lynch coffee maker? And theoretically, yes, I could, if I was willing to win the bid. Now, I had a little search through the site, see what was there. There were things that were obvious to people. There was like three GS3s, espresso machines. I think the most expensive one, and this is like a, what, $7,000, $8,000 espresso machine, sold for $45,500. Someone spent a lot of money on David Lynch's GS3. I kept browsing the site until I found something that caught my eye, something unusual, and I thought this, this was going to be my target. And so we began to bid. And then watching as the final auction happened and noting, actually, that the auctioneers seemed to quite like this thing, too. He seemed to think it was fun. This is a 1970s electric espresso maker from the 70s. Somehow, we pulled it off and we won the bid. And now, this is very exciting. It's here. Now, I need something to open this. A lot of you get upset when I use craft knives, so I'll get the proper tool. Confusingly, it says this side up, but there's no way to open this side, so I'm going to have to open this side. Come on. You use the right tool. Are you rewarded for your efforts? I'm not sure you are. Here it is. Mini Bar Electric Espresso Coffee Maker. I saw this. I was very compelled by it because I've never seen one before. Auction lot, three, four, seven, one. Interestingly, on the back of this is a little diagram to show you what they've opened up and had a look at. Now, I've seen inside this because it's on the auction page. And so you can look at the auction page and see how much we paid. And yes, cost about $2,000. And that's hard to justify. I mean, look, I love David Lynch very much, but it's still, it got a little silly in this auction. Anyway, this is a fancy, it's a fancy thing. David Lynch's. Has it been used or not? I don't think it has been. Look at how old it is. I've never seen, oh, look at this, anything like it. Now, can I just, I'm very drawn to this picture. We're going to have to derail things slightly. Look at this. They appear to have painted a mustache on a 14 year old boy and he's drinking coffee and he's liking it. And he's got an enormous pocket square. That's not great. Good color reproduction, held up very well. So here's the instructions. Tasteful, nice. Can't really tell what's going on here. Appears to have a steam wand. That's terrifying. Look at all of these. How have I never seen these before? Genuinely, like how have I never seen any of these coffee makers before? Have you seen these before? I've never seen any of these anywhere. For sure. Oh, we get cups. Ooh. Now, that's got that sort of Bakelite feel where it wasn't the microplastics that wouldn't get you. It was just straight the plastics. Do you know what I mean? Like it's back when everything was probably terrifying and dangerous. Anyway, we get a cup, we get another cup, two cups. We get a spoon. Look at that. This is for two spoons because, you know. And then we get the mini bar. Patent pending? Patent. Patented. And Ferrara. And then we've got a little spout. For the two cups. This is like an electric mocha pot. Because look, this I think goes on there and then you put your two cups underneath. Is that right? Look at that. How very exciting. And we've got a power supply. Now, what's this? You, ooh. When using the coffee maker for the first time, it's advisable to make it work with water only without putting any coffee in to the purpose of sterilizing the inside of the boiler. The same will be done when the machine has been inactive for some time. Fine. I'm glad I read that. It seems sensible. I will run this empty before I run it. I'm gonna get a transformer that works. Ooh, there's, ooh. Stop, stop. Look at this. It's David Lynch's coffee bean. I don't know why that's funny. Why? There's two. There's two coffee beans. They don't smell of anything but the past. Quite a light roast. Respect, Mr. Lynch. Quite a light roast, because I think I had some of your coffee once. It was quite a dark roast. And if you look, if you bought the grinder of his, for some reason it was sold with like the filthiest hopper I've ever seen. Well, I've seen actually filthier many times, sadly. Someone should just wash that. You can just wash that off. Now, I feel kind of upset if someone auctioned my stuff and something was just like filthy. I put the coffee beans back. What do I do? Look, I could read the instructions, but they're in Italian and I believe in myself. So I'm going to take it to pieces and see what I can clean. Oh. There we go. Oh, you're not a lot of coffee. How do you? So I'm guessing water in. So inside, oh. Oh, that's, that's days gone by. I'm, it's not familiar, yet somehow nostalgia. It looks like an electric mocha pot. So this is less surprising as these things go. Somehow, I genuinely still stunned I haven't come across this before. Give me the same effect of the mocha, right? Where you boil water, steam happens, water gets pressed down by the steam expanding, pushed up the tube, through the tube. Here is where coffee will live. So it'll go through the coffee. And then I guess this is your like a basket that's going to do the filtration of the ground coffee. That's going to sit above. So you put your water in, you go in there, you put your coffee in there, you dunk a little fella on top and then you close it all up and then you plug it in. And I guess we're going to have coffee. They want me to brew it with water first because they don't want the taste of days gone by, the taste of the decades since this was manufactured in my espresso. And I guess I'll do what they want me to. It feels anticlimactic to just have water come out of it the first time though. You know what I mean? I feel like you should just put coffee in straight away. See what happens. Should we not? I think we should. Maybe I don't drink the coffee. Maybe I do. I'm not sure how we're getting two cups of coffee out of this space. Do you know what I mean? Generously, I think we're going to struggle with like 14 grams. We'll grind 14 grams because just, let's just find out. And we'll go for the moka pot grind that we kind of recommend, which is not espresso fine, actually a good bit coarser. I am going to still, as an impatient man, put boiling water in here. Also, because this is 110, 120 volt and that's not proper power, is it? 240 volts, 13 amps. That's what we're craving. Proper power. While I ground some coffee, saner voices have prevailed and said we really have to run this with water. And so reluctantly, I have put some boiling water inside this. It's now connected to a sort of large converter box thing over here, which is not that exciting, but it is an appropriate step-down converter, I believe. All I know is 120 volt. I don't know the amperage draw on it. There's no switch on this thing here. And so when I turn on the converter, I guess this turns on. I don't know. It looks like there's a kind of jacketing element and that will boil the water and we'll just have a dry run, but with water. So it's not really a dry run, is it? Off we go. Ooh, I see a little smoke. It feels anticlimactic to just have water come out of it the first time. We've had smoke in the past when we've turned on devices for the first time. Well, it's working. Look at this. I'm gonna cut it there. All right, so I guess we let it cool down. Instructions, I'll be honest, would have been nice. Oh yeah, 48 out. We have some losses to the coffee. 30, we'd lose, you know, maybe a gram. So we'd get like 32 singles each. Two, you know, we'd get 14 to 30-ish. So like, okay, I've done the responsible thing. Let's make coffee. Excuse the chaos going on here. This bit will be the challenge. We've got to get, let's be smart. Let's be smart. Let's do a before and after. See how much coffee we can get in this thing. Oops. Oh, it's making a terrible mess. Everything's hot. Painful. Right, am I tamping with you for how this is going down? Not too fine. So I don't think we're gonna have problems there. Said that before. So what we'll do is tighten it down. So we got six and a half grams into our container. I'm not gonna have a strong coffee on the other side of this. I don't think we're gonna get more than that in there. Should it go into two cups? Yes, yes. I don't know if this has ever been used before. It doesn't look used, but there were coffee beans in the box. And we found something else, actually. We found some fluff. We're calling it David Lynch. We'll put it back. We'll put it back in the box. Am I venturing to territories never previously explored by the icon David Lynch? Let's find out. Let's listen to the gurgle. Will there be more smoke? Am I sitting too close to this? All of these questions will be answered. It's coffee. What? Oh, that's a sippage. Well, it is coffee. We've made coffee. And I should do really what David Lynch would do before drinking this. Just check its refractive index. Kid, I'm gonna stir it with a David Lynch teaspoon. It doesn't smell bad. We've put some nice coffee inside. Put some fresh, good, suitable water inside. But what has the brewer brought to the party? Well, I can see why it might be unused or minimally used. It looks so cool. The packaging is so delightful. The coffee is bad. It's when you get mocha pots wrong. The coffee's a bit too coarse. So it tastes a little underextracted. But my goodness me, it got hot. It got really hot in there. And it has that harsh, kind of aggressive finish. Bitterness. This is not a good time. It's not a good time. No one's having a good time. I could take the grind finer, maybe. Try and build a little pressure up. Try and get a little creamy crema on top. Will I be rewarded with deliciousness for my efforts? We could find out, but I doubt it. Not really looking forward to taking this apart and cleaning it, if I'm honest, because it's just hot. It's just all hot. I'd like to report back from cleaning it, first of all. Miserable. Absolutely miserable experience. Like this bit comes out as hot. You can pull this bit off, which is the little top piece. Put it in upside down last time. Check the diagram. Got that wrong. I'll do it right this time. Don't worry. Pull this off. Great bed of coffee. But if you turn this and then tock, tock, tock, knock it into the bin, the little, this bit just comes off because it just sits loose at the bottom. It's terrible. That's a terrible design. I'm mad about that. That is just bad. So, pour some fresh water. I'm gonna go for the full seven grams this time. Slightly finer grind. We should be able to get a bit closer. Here we go. Right, let's find out if we can. Well, that's not bad, you know. I've not done a bad job there. It's a little bit messy. I will, for now, get my assembly down here. I do like, you can put this wherever you want. We plug it in and then just tighten it down. That's thoughtful. Okay. Plug you in. Let's return our cups. Let's try again. Could be me. Let's not rule out user error. I feel like I should be a bit quicker with the off switch because you just get this sort of liquid and then it's just all angry and steamy. So I should cut that bit as quick as I can. It does say it has a thermostat, but I'm not sure at what temperature it's holding it. I'm also not sure whether it would be worth the effort of investigating the answer. A bit more of a gentle brew. Here we go, I'm gonna kill the heat. Let's have a look at what we got. Oh yes. Oh no. That does smell worse. I don't think coffee has a personality, but if it did, I would say this was a pretty chill coffee made very angry by the brewing process. It smells livid. Even though it's very effective because of a rapid cooling, blowing on any of your food and drink does make you feel like a child. I will drink it. More body, more texture, more bitterness in the finish. Just really a lot. The whole point of my Moka Pot technique, going all the way back to when we did a bunch of investigations of the Moka Pot, is to sort of get the water just about hot enough to create a little bit of pressure, but not too hot. That way the water that gets pushed through the system is pushed through with adequate pressure to do good percolation, but not so much temperature that it just pulls all of the really harsh flavors out of the coffee. Obviously this thing is just like, boil the water, get it done. And it's just a bit aggressive. Maybe there's a reason that I've never seen the V-LOX minibar before. Now, why review this? Well, I saw this stuff come up at auction. A lot of people sent it to me. And if I'm honest, I'm a David Lynch fan, not just of his hair. And the idea of owning David Lynch's coffee maker was very compelling. And I thought, I make videos about coffee stuff. This is justifiable as a thing I could do. I could bid on this. And I did bid on this. And now it's here and I have David Lynch's coffee maker. And so you're thinking, well, I was thinking he's going to give it away to Patreon. Here's what you do, right? You are supported by Patreon. And so you review stuff and you give it to one of your Patreon supporters through a contest. And I thought I'd do that. I'd really like to own this, but I'm going to give it away to one of my Patreon supporters because actually I think that's a better story. Do you know what I mean? Like this is an object that is not going to be used because it makes frankly terrible coffee, but it looks so cool. So this is a thing that you're just going to have out and on show. And I'm very lucky. I have a lot of stuff. And I like the idea that someone will end up with this in their house because they supported a YouTube channel about coffee, trying to do kind of independent work and reviews and they supported that. And then they got this as a random cosmic kind of outcome. That's a good story of like, how do you end up with David Lynch's coffee maker? The story of, well, I have a YouTube channel about coffee. And so I bid on it at auction and now I have it. That's not a great story. It's a good idea for a video, but it's not a great story or an end point for this thing. So as much as it pains me because I really like the idea of owning this, I do, it is going to be mine, but temporarily. And I will clean it and look after it and leave David Lynch and the two coffee beans inside the box. And this will go on to someone else, somewhere else. And I hope they are delighted by it because I'm delighted by its existence. I'm delighted by an independent of David Lynch owning it. I just never, ever want to use it to make a coffee ever again. That's that. I think now it's time for something a little bit more delicious. I was trying to eat at the start of this video, but I want to hear from you down in the comments below. So something you want to know about this. Have you ever seen one of these? Do you own one of these? Are you one of the few out there that has a Velux mini bar espresso maker? Did you look at the David Lynch auction? Were you tempted by something? Did you buy the GS3? If you're out there, let me know down in the comments below. But for now, I say thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great day. I'm desperate for this pie. I am.