In Search of the Perfect Cup, the Old Coffee Pot Is Passé

By DEBORAH BALDWIN


"I hope I'm not talking too fast," David B. Dallis, president of Dallis Coffee, said to a rapt audience during a recent tour of his roasting plant in Ozone Park, Queens.

Hardly. This was a caffeinated crowd, devotees of the perfect home-made espresso, with a thirst for knowledge and an accelerated sense of time.

There was Owen Egan, a photographer from Montreal who carried along a high-tech thermometer and a thermocouple, which he uses to test temperatures in the commercial espresso machine that he keeps in his kitchen.

Madeleine Page, a psychotherapist from Philadelphia, wanted to talk about reassembling her secondhand commercial Cimbali, which she has stripped down to its parts. The effort, she said, will be worth it: "I couldn't find a good latte."

Leaders of a zealous subculture, they and about a dozen others had come to hear insights from a master and to share the joys and frustrations of taming high-pressure steam to make the perfect cup. Normally they would meet only at sites on the Web like wholelattelove.com and coffeegeek.com.

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