Buy It For Life: Olympia Cremina Edition
One of my favorite corners of the internet is Reddit’s Buy It For Life. This is a group obsessed with great gear. Not flashy or super expensive, but rather great stuff that works… and works forever.
My favorite coffee tool of all time is also my favorite kitchen toy, and maybe even my favorite object in my home. It’s a 1983 Olympia Express Cremina lever espresso machine. I bought it years ago (after wanting a Cremina for a long (long) time and I already know I’m going to have it for life. That’s pretty impressive considering the espresso machine is at least 34 years old.
I’m at least the third owner of the machine, but it was very lightly used before I received it. That said, the machine has pulled thousands of espresso shots over its life and it’s still in great shape, so I fully belief it has thousands more left in it.
Does the machine have quirks sure? For one, it’s expensive (in terms of upfront cost, it’s very cheap once you amortize that expense over its lifetime). Second, it uses a 49mm coffee tamper, which is a strange size only used by lever espresso machines where all professional and prosumer machines use a 58mm tamper. It also has a tiny little water tank which is only good for a few drinks a day. And it overheats, so after three drinks (or so) the grouphead is hot enough to scald your coffee and ruin an otherwise perfect shot.
But the Cremina is built like a muscle car. It’s overbuilt in every way possible. It’s also dead simple, so anyone can work on it, even if you barely know how it works. And it’s completely rebuild-able, so all its parts are readily available, whether you have a 1967 Cremina or a 2017 one.
And yes, in true buy-it-for-life fashion, the Olympia Cremina is still sold today. The 2017 model — the 50th anniversary edition — is much shinier and slicker than the 1967 model, but they are fundamentally the same thing.
What other 50 year old design is still sold today with almost no changes at all?You are looking at true classics like the Eames Lounge and Vitsoe 606 shelving system. The Cremina truly belongs in the class of those amazing pieces of functional art.
The Cremina is such an outlier because it runs contrary to almost all modern appliances. The Cremina is built forever — not build to cut costs, to be efficient, to use new-age materials, or be recyclable, or to be upgradeable. A team of people set out to build the best home espresso machine ever made and they just might have accomplished that.
At a current price of $3,799, in the US in 2022, the Cremina hasn’t seen the inflation-related rise in prices of many of its competitors, meaning the price isn’t as shocking as it once was, but the quality is just a good as always. The price has also softened because of some nice upgrades we’ve seen to the machine over the past decade or so (a small timeframe relative to the Cremia’s lifetime. These include the most to a stainless steel water tank, the dropping of the outdated brown color which so many second-hand buyers are stuck with, and the inclusion of a pressure dial on the front of the machine.
