Ever since I've ventured into coffee forum, pressurized basket seems to get frowned upon, mainly because they creates the fake crema even if stale or coarse coffee are used.

But what happens if you use fresh coffee, top notched grinder in a pressurized basket, on a top-of-the-line machine?

Theoretically, it may give a better control. With the current practice in espresso prep, we're intentionally creating enough fines to restrict the flow, and the choice of grind setting is very often not driven by the taste.

Recently they're many discussion about unimodal grind for espresso using brew grinder too. Since those brew grinders create less fines, a pressurized filter may just be the ticket?

You get something that might taste pleasant, but won't be modern espresso in terms of the mouthfeel or the layering of flavors. The essence of modern (i.e. post Gaggia) espresso is that the puck controls the flow. The interaction of the fines at the base of the puck with the outflowing extract creates the layered and emulsified espresso + crema. The restrictor basket does add a dash of aerated bubbles to this extraction, but does not change the characterless mouth feel and flavor layering.

Pressurized basket espresso is like a collapsed souffle or molten ice cream with a dollop of cool whip on top. With a really great spoilt souffle or ice cream, the resulting decorated slop might even taste good, but who cares?

As Illy writes "By means of the energy transferred to the bed by the water pressure drop...". With a pressurized basket, this pressure drop doesn't occur across the bed; a material change.

samuellaw178 wrote:the choice of grind setting is very often not driven by the taste.

For me, taste is all that drives it.

It's the difference between espresso and frothy coffee.

samuellaw178 wrote:Ever since I've ventured into coffee forum, pressurized basket seems to get frowned upon, mainly because they creates the fake crema even if stale or coarse coffee are used.

But what happens if you use fresh coffee, top notched grinder in a pressurized basket, on a top-of-the-line machine?

Theoretically, it may give a better control. With the current practice in espresso prep, we're intentionally creating enough fines to restrict the flow, and the choice of grind setting is very often not driven by the taste.

Recently they're many discussion about unimodal grind for espresso using brew grinder too. Since those brew grinders create less fines, a pressurized filter may just be the ticket?

Try it and share the results. I'd be interested to hear how it might work for unimodal grinds. I might try it myself when (if ever) my Bunn G1 shows up. I have a pressurized basket that came with my Classic.

Consider it as a "drink exploration" experiment rather than tangling with the established espresso paradigm.

I personally always had this opinion in regards:
that although is not the best solution,
they have a purpose in their application:
to compensate for the lack of performance of the units
the pressurized portafilter helps the purpose

I like this thread as a thought experiment. It sounds like a great experiment. The notion of abandoning the deeply held beliefs about how great espresso is made, is definitely a difficult thing to do. This was along the same lines as grinding greens to get less fines; but for realistic reasons, you would end up with green butter due the the moisture content. The same ""MIGHT"" go for a pressurized PF, but what if we tweaked the idea of what a pressurized PF was.

• Can we steep the puck, and then open a valve to brew normally?
• Can we adjust the spring tension for different levels of pressurization?
• What if we created a basket where the bottom looked like a bunch of coffee straws, and then put a valve and spring in every single straw, and ""FORCED"" the water to flow evenly through the puck?

Used my Preciso and of course fresh beans on a Delonghi Bar32 I started with, no comparison to the same setup but with my CC1. Even with fresh beans pressurized basket is still forcing coffee through a tiny hole into the spouts.

I could imagine an on-the-fly adjustable pressurized basket that only caused significant restriction if flow was too fast. Say the grind is just slightly too coarse and based on the first few seconds of flow (as compared to results measured from proper shots), you are probably going to end up with a 15 second shot. You could back off the pump pressure (I do this), but perhaps there is some advantage in increasing the restriction caused by the basket. That will also decrease flow and perhaps fix the shot.