kafou wrote:I begin to use a WDT and I must admit it's a nice tool but I don't understand what is happening now with all these job aids. WDT, distributor, paper filter, dynamometric tamper, etc.... So no more real Barista who can make old school espresso shot like 10 years ago. It begin to look like Jura or Nespresso machine with no human skill required to make a good espresso shot.

In the olden days we only had dark roasts which where really easy to extract. If you buy dark roasts now and don't use any aid it's still super simple to pull consistent espresso. That's the easy part but nowadays we're exploring more and more and pushing the limits which makes extracting great coffee a lot harder. From this came all the techniques to aid in this process.

So yes we're using more and more aids but you still need a lot of human skill to make all of them work together. If still think even with all of the aids you need more barista skills with really hard extracting coffees then you need skills without all the aids to pull a good shot from a traditional Italian blend.