Who has actually had a PF or basket get damaged from soaks? I've always thrown in with other stuff like screens etc to soak in cafiza for years, never an issue. I have my main basket, HQ21, from like 10+ years ago that I still use and soak till this day, still looks new. Sorry but that marketing aspect made me lose respect for them, never heard of that all these years. Straight up snake oil bs marketing.

JRising wrote:
If we're going to be making up problems to sell $300 portafilters we should go with "No more accidental loss of baskets in the trash can, this filter basket never leaves the portafilter handle".

lol

Looks more like an VST in flow characteristics probably, so thats a no thank you for me. Light roast, dark roast, various machines, lever, profiling or not, every time I pull my VSTs out and play they go right back in the drawer. HQ baskets ftw!

Leaving aside the price, the portafilter's hole placement/distribution seems intuitively better if one is willing to do the careful prep needed for light roasts ... kind of like the VST, but taken to 11. Interesting that the suggested workflow uses paper filters to go on the bottom, and a puck screen to go on the top. (The portafilter comes with paper filters and a puck screen.)

The thing that I don't understand is:

Since the basket holes are not tapered, the weight capacity is flexible, but we recommend 18-24g.

cmin wrote:Who has actually had a PF or basket get damaged from soaks? I've always thrown in with other stuff like screens etc to soak in cafiza for years, never an issue.

Almost all of the used machines that I've purchased over the years have had their spouted portafilter's brass exposed where the chrome (or whatever the shiny plating is) has been worn off. Of course, we don't know the cleaning practices of previous owners, especially with commercial machines. On the other hand, I haven't had any issues with new spouted portafilters that I've bought (and cleaned daily with plain soap).

Getting back to the new Weber product, I'm not clear on why this is a concern with a bottomless portafilter ... or with the stainless-steel spouted portafilters available today.

cmin wrote:I have my main basket, HQ21, from like 10+ years ago that I still use and soak till this day, still looks new.

I have a collection of worn baskets from old commercial machines. Given the various machines' histories, the holes seem to get bigger over time - I presume as insoluble coffee solids wear away the metal. Eventually very hard-to-see cracks will form between holes, and after a longer time, the basket bottom will tear under the pressure of a shot.

However, a basket in commercial use might see about the same number of shots in a day as a home user might see in a year. In home use, I've only seen torn basket posts from people who have used the early 'v1' Silvia daily for 25+ years. (Note that the original 12g (nominal) Silvia basket is not the same as today's Silvia baskets, which are now "precision-made" by IMS).

cmin wrote:Looks more like an VST in flow characteristics probably, so thats a no thank you for me. Light roast, dark roast, various machines, lever, profiling or not, every time I pull my VSTs out and play they go right back in the drawer. HQ baskets ftw!

Funny, I'm mostly the reverse . I tried the HQ ridgeless and now they're in a drawer. The ridged HQ are a different shape from the ridgeless, but I have other baskets of similar shape/hole pattern. To me, the design of all those HQ baskets or similar seem to reduce the chance of side channeling. With a VST, I've found that careful distribution is needed to avoid side channeling ... but on some mornings I just want to grind, tamp, and pull - no scales, no timer, no RDT, no WDT, no OCD - and so, no VST basket on those mornings .