- Today, we're going to talk about espresso machine baskets. Why are they so important? Why are they, I think, an essential upgrade? How do you tell if yours is good or not? And how exactly do they affect the way you brew espresso. All this and more, we will answer today. Now this is kind of important. I'm going to talk today about a couple of brands that I think are good and make very good baskets. What I can't do is really know the entire state of the market, so I can't tell you who's making bad baskets necessarily or where different manufacturers are, so we're not actually going to pick on anyone necessarily today and say "you're doing a bad job" but like I said, we'll talk about how to literally identify a well-made basket from a badly made basket. Now, I need to do just a little bit of history because the invention of the precision basket is a relatively modern thing, go back maybe 12 years, a little bit more, it wasn't really something we thought about or worried about despite the fact that actually it was having a big impact on the way that we were making espresso. Because you've got to remember that espresso comes from Italy, it comes from 14 grams for a double and modern espresso had started using 18 20, 22, 24 grams of coffee in the same baskets. And we hadn't thought about the way that the baskets themselves were impacting the coffee we were making. Now we would have funny issues with baskets; I've seen baskets split at the bottom, I've seen badly made baskets where the flow in a two group is totally different out of one side than the other, because the baskets were inconsistent in that regard and it can make a really big difference. So it became a thing we worried about primarily due to one man, one company. That was a guy called Vince Fedele of VST who still make Precision Baskets, who also make refractometers. He had a very big impact on the industry. His background: he did I think what was ultimately Apple's first external hard drive, he has a background in technology and he'd built a 3D fingerprint scanner. And one day he put his espresso machine's basket onto his 3D fingerprint scanner and was appalled by the results. What he saw was a lack of uniformity in the holes at the bottom of the basket. Not just with the varying sizes, some weren't proper holes, there hadn't been properly machined in the first place, and then he put a different basket on and saw, even though it was the same manufacturer, it was different again. And he saw an opportunity and he started to make baskets that I think had a really really really big impact. I was, for disclosure, a beta tester of those baskets back in what would have been maybe 2010. It did result in me making one of the most satisfying espressos of my life, Tim Wendelboe, fantastic roaster from Norway, also a blunt and fussy man, and I don't think he would mind me saying that, he has strong opinions and is not afraid to share them. Well, he came to visit and I'd had some fun dialing in his espresso blend, exactly how I wanted it to. Because we were just at the beginning of understanding weight in, weight out, understanding the importance of those things. And then having this basket that let me properly extract coffee let me serve him something that he couldn't make in his shop. And he left annoyed and that made me embarrassingly delighted. But let's get into why they impact espresso and how they might make your espresso taste better. It's important to understand that when you brew espresso, the puck of coffee is doing most of the work to create resistance to the water flowing from the pump, but the basket plays a role too. It's not just total open area, it is mostly a solid surface with some very small holes scattered throughout it. That means that the basket offers some resistance. What Vince very quickly worked out was that for a fixed amount of coffee, that resistance should be kind of commensurate, it should match. So that if you were say brewing 14 grams, you might want to have more resistance from the basket than if you were brewing say 18 grams. Because if you kept the resistance the same you'd have to grind your 18 grams much much coarser to have a similar flow rate. Grinding coarser decreases your extraction, you get more acidity, you are tempted to roast darker, you get into a cycle, a kind of spiral of dark roasting under extraction that I think a lot of the industry had been in for a long time. And so Vince came along and offered a different kind of thing, and he began to produce baskets that had doses on the side. If I get one for an 18 gram basket and one for a 22 gram basket, you'll see that they're actually quite different. You get a little chart showing you the count of holes and the hole sizes that's kind of interesting, but you'll see there's a difference in the distribution between the two. So as a quick illustration of the total open area, I'll show you a kind of simple experiment. I'm going to grind about 40 grams of coffee for espresso, a little bit more than I need. I'm gonna give it a good mix up, so that for each of these two doses they're going to be using identical coffee. And I'll put 18 grams into an 18 gram basket and I'll put 18 grams into a 22 gram basket. And we'll compare the flow from each one because the 22 gram basket should have a larger open area, we should see a faster flow. Now I know there'll be some impact from there being a larger headspace in the 22 gram basket, but really we're looking at just overall flow rate, and I think it's a nice illustration of the difference you get in well-made baskets. Now this is all taken to its logical extreme by these things: pressurized portafilter baskets. They look normal on one side, but you'll typically see this just one small hole on the other side. These are there to have the basket itself, add all the resistance that's missing because you're using coarsely-ground coffee. When you use properly finely ground coffee, the basket doesn't have to add much resistance, if you're using pre-ground coffee, the basket has to do a lot more work, and so that's literally what's happening here. The basket is adding all the resistance you're missing to give you a kind of appropriate flow rate, and to let you build the kind of pressure you need to to pull out any CO2 that's in the coffee to give you some sort of crema at the end of it, so that's the extreme. And you kind of don't want too much resistance if you've got a good grinder. Now, if you're out there shopping for a basket, you've got a number of choices to make in terms of the basket that you buy. You'll see some baskets have ridges along the side here, some do not, and the difference between a ridged and ridgeless basket, isn't really in the brewing itself, It's in the wider utility of the whole thing. In an espresso machine portafilter, you'll have a little spring, like this we call it a spring, but it's just a piece of wire kind of clip that sits inside and holds the basket. If this is weak or the basket is ill-fitting the ridges there to help give you another layer of security of holding the basket in so that when you knock the puck out that the basket doesn't fall out too. In most cases, these clips are perfectly adequate to not need a ridge on the basket and having no ridge means that the puck knocks out cleaner, and that's a good thing. So I am a big fan of ridgeless baskets over ridged and I would rather change this little clip out and have a stiffer one than go to a ridged basket from a kind of workflow perspective, just because the easier, the better. Now, the other thing that obviously changes with different baskets in terms of volume is actually the literal height of the basket here. If you take an 18 gram basket and a 22 gram basket, well, one is literally taller than the other to allow more coffee in there without pressing it against the shower screen, you don't want to be mashing coffee against the shower screen that may disrupt the puck as well, so larger doses should go into larger baskets, that makes total sense. You can always underdose a basket, and the downside will generally be that the puck at the end is kind of sloppy and loose because it's had a lot of space to expand at the end of the shot. So when you finish brewing espresso in many machines, it discharges the pressure up through the group head, and that causes the puck to expand. The more space you have for expansion, the looser and wetter the puck will be afterwards. It doesn't tell you a lot more than that so from a, again, workflow perspective, I like to have a dry puck at the end because it knocks out cleanly, but if I have to drop the dose, that's fine if I could only have one basket, I would go for the largest dose I would ever want to use. I might pick a 20 gram even though I might brew 18 grams quite often, but I can't brew 20 grams very effectively, or certainly 21 in an 18 gram basket. So if you're going to pick one, go just a little bit bigger than you might need that's my kind of recommendation, but I understand that will be a little bit messier. Now, if you want to assess the basket that you have, it's kind of easy to do a very surface level assessment. The first thing you should do is literally hold it up to the light and inspect the holes. If they are inconsistent in sizing, if there are some holes that aren't completely punched through and sadly that actually does happen if they're kind of clogged or you can see the hole itself is not perfectly circular, it's kind of burred-shaped, you don't have a well-made basket. They are sadly very common, they are not doing a good job, they will age really badly, they're more likely to split those kinds of burred holes will brew kind of differently than the ones that are properly machined, it's just not recommended. Espresso is hard enough, you don't need your basket making your life harder. You can go a little further and have a little look with a microscope if you have one to hand or a magnifying glass. I think you'd be kind of surprised by what you see with a cheaper espresso machine basket and you compare that to one of the many precision baskets, and it's not just VST. I think Pullman do a nice set too, IMS makes some nice baskets, you'll really really see the difference. Now, you'll see that all of these baskets are generally straight walled baskets, and these are double baskets designed for at least 13, 14 grams of coffee to pull what is a double espresso. There are single baskets, these are difficult to work with. Generally speaking, there are much more conical shapes and they have a smaller open area at the bottom again, because you want to sort of match the resistance to having half the dose of a double basket. They are obviously a different shape generally speaking, the same dose, but cut in half won't match across to these. Rarely do you see these used in homes, but you do see them used all the time in Italy. In fact, the kind of single basket is, I feel like, used more often than not in Italy compared to the double. There are lots of different designs from manufacturers out there you'll see some that are cone-shaped like this, some that are almost little miniature straight walled sort of sections in the middle of the basket kind of dropped down, they are more difficult to prep, they're more difficult to brew evenly, they're more likely to channel or extract unevenly under most puck prep situations. And so they're a really interesting challenge if you're looking for one for espresso, if you think espresso is easy, get yourself a single basket I think that's a good challenge. Brewing better with it is maybe a different video and a different topic but you should just know about these things they're just not as easy as I wish they were, but good results are possible. You've just got to work for them that little bit harder. And so that is a very quick overview of espresso machine baskets. I would strongly recommend for just about every single machine out there buying a precision basket. It is reliable, it's well-made and it will get you better espresso because it will let you grind finer than most baskets will typically let you. That higher open area is really useful if you want to up your extraction game, especially if you're using lighter roasts or kind of trickier to extract, more complex, more interesting coffees. Don't be surprised if you switch to a precision basket and you see your flow rate suddenly increase. What was brewing at maybe 28 seconds is suddenly brewing in 17 seconds, even though you didn't change the grinder, that's pretty normal. That's the difference in the resistance from the basket that I think can be shocking for a lot of people. The end result, I think, is a sweeter more complex espresso than you would get from a cheaper basket and a more reliable result. And if you're in a cafe, then 100% precision baskets so that you know that one group is brewing identically to the other and to a third. It's all too common with cheap machines to have a different appearing flow rate just because the baskets don't match and that is unacceptable and extremely annoying. There's a few brands I would recommend, I'll leave some links to the descriptions down below. I think IMS do do a 54 millimeter basket for those of you that might have a Breville or other machines with smaller baskets, 58 millimeter baskets are much much more common, and there's a couple more options out there too, but I'm not going to say one is superior to another. I would just generally say precision baskets are a good investment, will make your espresso better, and now I want to hear from you. Did you have a big change in how you were brewing when you switched to one of these baskets? Did it make your espresso taste better? I'd love to hear from you down in the comments below, but for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.