The Olympia Express Maximatic - is it an overlooked espresso masterpiece?

Olympia Express is a Swiss company famous for making beautiful, well engineered, heirloom quality espresso machines. Their most famous, which has enjoyed a cult following for decades, is the Cremina (which I have reviewed separately here and here). While the Cremina enjoys a legendary status among manual lever machine enthusiasts, the Maximatic gets much less attention, expecially in social media circles. This is probably because there are a number of competitors in the marketplace that offer similar (or more) features at its price point. In that case, what sets the Maximatic apart today, and is there a case for buying one?

The Tiniest Heat Exchanger

Let’s get through the basics first. The Maximatic is a pump-driven, heat exchange machine, and by footprint it is the smallest such machine made anywhere in the world. If you aren’t familiar with the term, a “heat exchanger” like the Maximatic has a single pressurized boiler that heats water to a very high temperature above 100 degrees Celsius. This boiler produces the steam that you can use to froth milk and make cappuccinos. When you want to brew a coffee, the electric pump pulls water from a cold reservoir, into a pipe that runs through the steam boiler, and then on to the brewing group to saturate your ground coffee. The theory…