Visiting Paul Pratt in Hong Kong

visited 7/12/07

First and foremost I would like to apologies for long absence from my blog. I am back in Adelaide now after my fantastic Asian travels I have a few posts to catch up on so please keep checking back. In this particular blog I would love to share my Hong Kong experiences. Whilst in Hong Kong I had a chance to visit few espresso bars as well as Mr. Paul Pratt at Just Java.

As many of you know Paul is the man behind bumper tools, I personally used some bumper gear back in the days, especially the tamping stand. Paul has a very creative mind when it comes to coffee tools. Everything that they make gets assembled in their workshop they even polish and refine each and every tamper handle. I got a little insight on future products, one in particular caught my eye: bottomless knockbox that comes up above the counter. A very practical and clean idea as the waste goes straight into the bin.

Behind Paul’s creative mind is a serious mind of espresso machine collector. Paul is world known for restoring vintage espresso machines, he even keeps a webpage. Here is one of his recent projects the infamous Faema E61 a real eye-candy to say the least and I got to see it first hand. The amount of effort that went into restoring this machine really is unbelievable, you can read all about it in Paul’s two part documented posts on coffeegeek.

Paul is also a very big collector of LaMarzocco machines so he has a few restored vintage machines around the place. Some of the machines are plugged in and are in frequent use, I even got a chance to play around on the original GS1, we pulled some decent shots. Also got to play around with few LaMarzocco lever machines.

I must say that visiting Paul and seeing his collection was possibly the best thing I have done in Hong Kong.

On top of bumper and restoring machines, Paul also keeps busy with roasting coffee as a boutique coffee roaster on his Probat roaster with crazy indoor exhaust filtration system, it allows him to roast indoors without pipes running out of the window.

I would like to thank Paul for fantastic tour of his facility. It is amazing to see people like Paul pushing the coffee industry to another level, very inspiring!