If regular coffee machines don’t tickle your fancy anymore, then you might need the Big Coffee Boxer. Turning a retired BMW R 18 Big Boxer engine into a fully-fledged coffee machine should tickle anyone’s fancy, even if you’ll never get to taste its brew. Now would be a good time to mention the roughly R160,000 (€7,900) price, or the fact that only 80 will ever be made.
Wake up and smell the exhaust fumes
“The heart of this machine is an original BMW boxer engine, combined with the legendary E61 brew group, which we have further developed. Both components are icons in their own right – together they make an impressive statement. The design is more reminiscent of a sculpture than an espresso machine – a work of art that prepares excellent espresso,” said ECM Manufacture.
Part of that expense has been used to leverage ECM’s expertise at making solid coffee machines (engine or not), while the rest has been blown on turning BMW’s largest-ever 1,800cc two-cylinder boxer engine into the coffee-dispensing work of art that sits before you (metaphorically, of course). As if you needed any proof, the Big Coffee Boxer comes in at 64kg and looks like it’d fit right in at a gallery somewhere — not your kitchen countertops.
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ECM hasn’t just stuck one of its deluxe coffee-makers into the BMW boxer engine and called it a day. The R18 Big Boxer is as much a contemporary art piece as it is a coffee machine, and ECM hasn’t wasted any room on the engine’s good bits. It makes use of the pressure gauge and valves on the body to help the high-pressure extraction process. It’s taken great strides to hide the fact that it’s a coffee machine, too, burying the tech deep inside.
Looks aside, the Big Coffee Boxer houses some serious espresso tech that’d set you back a fair few bucks even before it started pouring out of the Big Boxer’s valves. It’s got two independent water circulation systems– allowing both the coffee and foam to be prepared separately, speeding up the process tremendously. There’s no screen, but it’s got a dedicated shot counter and a quiet rotary pump to cap it all.
