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.
