Recently, in what can only be described as the holy grail of thrift store finds, I stumbled upon a fully-functioning, home-use, die-cast espresso machine. Although technically semi-automatic, it gives you many of the options you would typically find in a manual machine. The first being that you have to physically dial-in the amount of coffee that goes into your portafilter, as well as manually adjust for the amount of water that goes through it when pulling shots.