Mrs Eye needs a decent home machine to practice with until we start doing it for real.

Do any of the resident experts have experience of both / either

The two on the list are the Sage Dual Boiler and the Expobar Leva.

I don’t have either (mine is an Isomac Tea III) but I would go for the Expobar. It’s based around the Faema e61 group head, like many similar machines both home and commercial. As a result, spare parts are easily available and cheap as chips. If by ‘doing it for real’ you mean opening a cafe, you’ll find many parts interchangeable with the shop machine.

I don’t know anything about the other one, but you can bet it’d cost more if it went wrong. It’ll look naff in a few years as well, whereas the e61s are timeless. And didn’t Heston Blumenthal make a big deal of using Nespresso pods in his restaurant a while back? And now he wants to flog a proper machine?

Sage. I take pics for Caffeine magazine and the editor has one and is very impressed by it, said the steam was the best he had seen on a home machine, I would rather have a londinium though (I take pics of them too) but if I wasn’t hankering after a lever then the sage would be on my list, it may be a breville under the skin but they really have done their homework on this one.