Mies van der Rohe formulated a fantastic cornerstone for architecture which I always like to apply to coffee machines: “less is more.”

The company La San Marco has been producing an almost unchanged “LEVA” coffee machine for 50 years based on a completely different brewing system than today’s portafilter machines. The coffee water is taken directly from the boiler of the machine using pressure instead of a pump. The brewing pressure can be set higher than 9 bar and the extraction is not static. As a result, a higher amount of coffee and a finer degree of grinding can be used, which extracts the essence of the coffee in the brewing process.