At the beginning of August, when I first wrote about ECM turning a BMW Boxer motorcycle engine into a single-group espresso machine, I certainly could not have guessed that less than two weeks later I would be writing about another German company turning an espresso machine into a car engine via 3D printed parts. And if you’d asked me then if this whole espresso-machine-engine mashup was going to be the prevailing trend in coffee for an entire month, then I would have certainly said no. Yet here we are, and a San Francisco coffee company has put an espresso machine in a Ferrari that intertwines with the engine.
As reported by Super Car Blondie, Graffeo is a 90-year-old coffee roaster in San Francisco. Started by Giovanni Graffeo, the brand has been helmed by now 81-year-old Luciano Graffeo, until the sale of the company earlier this year to Walter Haas. (Haas, weirdly enough, has no relation to Gene Haas and the Haas F1 team. He’s just the son of the billionaire former CEO of Levi Strauss. You can’t win ‘em all.)
Per Super Car Blondie, the genesis for the idea came when new owner Haas found a bunch of old car magazines around Graffeo HQ, and when he asked Graffeo about it, the Italian stated that he used to drive Ferraris. “Long story short, I was talking with my creative team and we were just saying, wouldn’t it be funny if we bought a Ferrari and pulled espresso shots from the trunk?” Haas states.
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So that’s exactly what they did. That joke, by the way, cost between $75,000 and $125,000. Pretty funny.
After purchasing a 1984 Rosso red Ferrari 308—Graffeo’s favorite—the car was taken to Church of the Air Cooled, an aftermarket Porsche modifier. There, the trunk was outfitted with a single-group lever espresso machine, where it “intertwined with the V8 engine and the electric circuit.” (The engine is in the trunk.) A water line runs the length of the car to a tank under the hood in the front.
They’re calling it “the world’s most expensive espresso machine,” and they have taken it to NASCAR events and Monterey Car Week, where they pulled shots of their “triple-roasted beans” (their words not mine).
The 308 has been so well-received that Haas is considering other “crazy ideas,” like “what if you had a Vespa with the grinder?” Personally, I’d put the grinder in the Ferrari.
At this point I think we’ve run out of new ways to combine an espresso machine with an engine. But I would have said that after the last one too. And the one before that. How about an engine with AeroPresses for pistons? The AeroPress V8. Or maybe a manual brewing super-engine, which would be, of course, a V60.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
