Hey, coffee lvoers, how are you? Did you already have your tasty cup of coffee?
This week is a bit different for me, because it is Easter! Fridays in the week of Easter is officially day off work, so Saturday is the second day of the weekend. It is also the day when we decorate the Easter eggs, because on Thursday we dont have the time for that. And what a better company for the holiday tasks than a nice cup of filter coffee?
This year we decided to use more vivid, candy like colors for our eggs and they seem pretty fresh and shiny. We also used a technique with kitchen paper, which created a nice pattern to the eggs!
Do you like our eggs? The kids are really happy with all of these colorful decorations around the house.
But now let’s have a look at the more specialized coffee stuff around me…
If you follow my posts, you will probably remember that about three weeks ago I ordered an update kit for my espresso machine. It is more than a year since I last updated my coffee brewing setup, so I could not be more excited. And here is what I received.
Today I will focus on the portafilter. It is the part that is maybe most important for the brewing process. Of course, the machine is also important, but this is the part that you can replace without trouble at all.
I picked the Normcore brand, Chinese origin, because I think their products are relatively good priced and of excellent quality. I watched a lot of video reviews of this exact portafilter and my espresso machine and I decided the fit was perfect.
I like the stirdines of it and I have to mention that this is a lot heavier than the original portafilter, which comes with the espresso machine. It is solid in the hand and feels expensive. And because it is still new, you can see how shiny it is.
Of course I already had a lot of tests with it and it seems that my grinder will manage to do the job quite nicely. I was a bit worried if it will grind fine enough, because it is telatively cheap one, but for now it is more than good!
Compared to the old portafilter, this one requires a bit finer coffee, but why is this so?
The original portafilter uses a presurrized basked, ehile this one is open. A pressurized one usually has double bottom and only one tiny hole on the lower one. This serves as an additional pressure valve which means you can extract relatively good home espress even eith coarser grinding setting.
The open, or also called naked portafilter uses only the coffee size as a pressure “valve” so your coffee bed has to limit the amount of water that passes through. Usually, the $30 home grinders wont be able to do the job. My grinder costs about $130 and this is the minimum that you should have in order to brew coffee with one of these bottomless portafilters.
Needle distribution tool is crucial to prevent chanelling. The term chanelling is used to describe the tiny channels that occur in the coffee bed. This will couse uncontrolled sprouts that squirt all around the table when the portafilter has no bottom.
Seems that I am ready to extract! Here we are!
First of the extractions, before I manage to set the right grinding size seemd to be a little bit fast, but every following espresso seems better extracted than the previous one.
Now that I can compare this one with the old basket I can say that I manage to extract a lot more from the beans and coffee tastes a lot more complex and amazingly flavorful. The sournes start of the arabica beans is quickly being balanced with a good amount of natural sweetness. This all finishes with fruitful boquet to present the perfect homemade espresso shot.
Would you like to have one?
Here is an example of a little bit weak extraction, but it still looks quite cool!
That’s for now, see uou soon with more info about my purchases. 😁