entropyembrace wrote:Do I need a bottomless portafilter to use the Elektra double basket?

Yes: it will fit the stock Pav pre-millenium and indeed Cremina portafilters quite happily.

More here: Elektra/Pavoni side by side

Cheers

Mike

it's stunning to me how apparently little i know about coffee. i think this will be my last post for a long time since it seems upon searching that almost every conceivably relevant coffee topic has been threaded in this forum. thanks for the education so far thanks to HB for providing such a terrific resource.

michaelbenis wrote:Yes: it will fit the stock Pav pre-millenium and indeed Cremina portafilters quite happily.

More here: Elektra/Pavoni side by side

Cheers

Mike

cool I'll have to stop by my local espresso supply store and pick up an elektra basket or two I was assuming they would be too deep to fit in the standard portafilter...but looking carefully I can see that the La Pavoni double basket isn't using all of the depth available.

17gm (or, more accurately, 7.4 seconds of grinder run-time as controlled by a GraLab timer) into a VST 18gm basket in a LaCimbali pf for a 32gm (net) extraction -- which just about fills (including crema, obviously) a 60ml cup.

The Coffee Art tamper base is either curved or flat, depending on whim. The handle is either the spring-loaded "Tecnic" or polished wood -- also depending on whim. The Tecnic is set to 15kg, which is the same-ish pressure for the run-of-the-mill wooden handle.

Distribution is managed by rotating the pf during dosing, tapping the pf against the palm, tapping with the o-ring on one of the Coffee Art tamper bases, or -- rarely -- stirring with a valuable bamboo chopstick. (It came with a "3 for $4.99" take-out. Your choice rice, noodles, or both.) Accept no substitutes.

Current coffee is SM Monkey espresso blend, roasted to FC/FC+ on a slight variation of the program posted by HotTop on their site for an espresso roast using the type "p" roaster (http://www.hottopusa.com/profileP.html). The roast is rested at least 3 but no more than 8 days. N.B., 8 days is not particularly meaningful in the quality sense, it's just the outer limit of how long coffee lasts around here.

Extraction, not including 4 second pre-infusion, takes 24 seconds, plus or minus 4 (before I start worrying and screwing around trying to fix the flow). If the coffee runs too fast or too slow, typically I'll adjust the grind before fooling around with dosing. That's not necessarily the best way to do it, but around here the weather or a change in beans is more often the issue than under rested or stale coffee, or any of the other relevant factors.

The grinder setting is 3.5, but LaCimbali grinder settings are not consistent from grinder to grinder. And, as already said, it varies with humidity.

BUT

It's a mistake to assume that doing any single thing especially right while everything else is catch as catch as can will make a large positive difference; just as it's a mistake to assume you can't totally ruin a cup by screwing up something which seems small; just as it's a mistake to assume that by changing coffees you won't have to change everything else.

The key to most things espresso is developing as much consistency as you can manage into as many aspects as possible, so you can isolate and tweak variables one at a time. But don't take any of the measurements too seriously.

Put more stock in your senses than your scale.

BDL

entropyembrace wrote:cool I'll have to stop by my local espresso supply store and pick up an elektra basket or two I was assuming they would be too deep to fit in the standard portafilter...but looking carefully I can see that the La Pavoni double basket isn't using all of the depth available.

Just make sure it is the double basket for a Microcasa a Leva (49.3mm or thereabouts) and not a Microcasa Semiautomatica (58mm)!