The Spiritello is Kees van der Westen's newest creation, launched in 2024, and it answers a question lever lovers have asked for years. Could you take the heart of the commercial Spirit lever series and shrink it down into a machine that fits a home counter? The answer is this. Hand-built to order in the Waalre atelier and customisable in any colour and wood, it brings the real lever experience home.

The big breakthrough is that this is the first KvDW with an onboard water reservoir, a 3.5L 316L stainless tank fed by a quiet 180W internal rotary pump. No plumbing required, which means you can set it up wherever you like and move it if you need to. For a machine of this caliber, that freedom is a genuinely new thing.

The coffee comes from a spring-lever Idrocompresso group, the kind that gives you a naturally diminishing extraction pressure as the shot pulls, starting around 8 to 10 bar. You can adjust the spring pressure, and a knob underneath lets you set pre-infusion from 1.5 to 4.0 bar to suit the bean. A "stop shot" button next to the lever halts and flushes the group without pulling the lever back, a thoughtful touch on a manual machine. Two PID-controlled 316L boilers, 0.8L coffee and 3.5L steam, hold temperature steady, and a 53mm round display keeps an eye on your shot timer.

This version sets a crackle-black body against deep, rich walnut accents that develop character and patina over time, a warmer and more dramatic take that ages beautifully. It weighs about 45 kg and runs on 110V for North America. It is built for the home barista who wants a true lever, a machine with presence, and none of the plumbing.