About Gilka Coffee
We build portable espresso machines that use stored gas pressure instead of pumps and batteries. This page explains the engineering position, and the publishing standards we hold ourselves to.
The engineering position
Espresso needs about 9 bar. Almost every machine achieves that with a motor and a boiler, which is why café equipment weighs fifteen kilograms and needs a socket. Portable machines have spent decades working around that constraint with levers, hand pumps and batteries — each of which either adds weight, adds effort, or adds a dependency.
Stored gas is the alternative we build around. A food-grade CO₂ cartridge holds pressure at 57 bar at room temperature without any input. Regulate it down to 9 and the pressure problem is solved with a component that weighs almost nothing and never needs charging.
That is the whole thesis: solve pressure with stored energy, and spend the remaining engineering effort on the parts that are actually hard — regulation stability, thermal behaviour without a boiler, and a puck path that can be cleaned in the field.
What we are not
We are not claiming a portable machine matches a boiler-equipped one. It does not. Temperature stability, throughput and steam are real losses, and any article on this site that pretends otherwise would be lying to sell a product.
We are also not a marketplace. Every machine we discuss here is either ours or a category we are explaining. Where we compare, we compare physics, not brand personality.
Our editorial standards
These rules apply to everything published under the Gilka name. They are the reason some pages on this site look unfinished: we would rather leave a field empty than fill it with a number we cannot defend.
1. Measured, calculated, or labelled. Every figure is one of: a measurement of a specific machine, a calculation with stated assumptions, or an industry range with a source. If you cannot tell which, tell us.
2. No invented tests. We do not write "in our testing" about equipment we have not tested. No fabricated brew times, no invented pressure readings, no fictional baristas.
3. No invented reviews. Product reviews appear only after verified purchases, unedited and including negative ones. A product page with five stars and no sales history is a lie with a schema tag.
4. No invented availability. Delivery dates, warranty terms and prices publish when they are confirmed, not when they are convenient for a campaign.
5. Dates on everything. Articles carry publication and update dates. When specifications change, the article changes and the date moves.
6. Failure modes included. Every comparison we publish includes what the recommended option does badly. A comparison table without a row that embarrasses the winner is marketing.
7. Corrections in the open. Factual corrections get a note. We do not quietly rewrite history to look prescient.
How to read the numbers on this site
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Measured | Taken from a physical unit, with the method described |
| Calculated | Derived from stated assumptions; the arithmetic is shown |
| Industry range | A published standard or common practice, with a source |
| Design target | What a machine is being engineered to do — not yet verified |
| Publishes at launch | Unknown, and honestly marked as unknown |
Contact
Press, wholesale, repair and product questions all go to one place: the contact page. Technical corrections are especially welcome — if a number on this site is wrong, we would like to fix it.