after thousands of miles....

after many many days of sitting in sacks, suddenly green coffee beans are roasted, rested and bagged up. next thing they know, they are in a local cafe, grinded to a specific level and placed in a basket in a porterfilter.

this pic is of a naked porterfilter, meaning you can see the 500+ punched-hole basket where the shot of espresso will exit into a cup. possibly more familiar to you if there were a couple of spouts coming towards the camera. the naked version is supposedly better since the espresso is spending less time touching metal and also less time touching surfaces that may vary in temperature.

it may seem a little extreme to be taking these measures but when you think that 2oz (60ml) of espresso is pulled in under 30 seconds then it is very easy for a lot to go wrong. nonetheless, a naked porterfilter is a beautiful thing to watch when the coffee is in motion. i'll have some pics soon.

but what you are looking at is no ordinary basket. the baskets were devised by Synesso. these are better than the ones we received with the la marzocco espresso machine since they offer more holes allowing the coffee to pourly more evenly. they are also rather neat because they are ridgeless (normally found within the basket), offering the highly pressured hot water less resistance and a smoother journey into a cup. yes, we really do care this much about coffee.

this basket will actually hold enough coffee to make a triple shot. roughly 21 grams of coffee will be squashed into the basket technically making it a triple (7g of coffee per shot of espresso). people usually talk about coffee in terms of singles and doubles but that refers to an age of traditional size drinks. a traditional cappuccino should be a 6oz drink with a double shot making 20z of espresso (and leaving 2oz for hot milk and 20z for microfoam). however, most cafe drinks are in the region of 12-16oz and therefore requires a bigger shot of espresso to do the drink justice. there is also a school of thought that believes a triple-sized basket creates a far more flavourful shot of espresso.

i might do some dabbling and compare a double to a triple and see how our espresso changes in the cup.