$200 ESPRESSO BASKETS: Fancy Lancy Baskets

hey come here come here come here I've been hearing you've been you know having a rough time with your extractions but I've got the plug I've got I've got the solution for you it's it's very it's very easy um I've got it right in here all it's going to take is it's just one one little thing ready [Applause] [Music] it seems that almost every day there's a new product released with a promise of increased extractions more even extractions or just better workflow in general and that's happened again with baskets now we've had this movement once

before when we turn from kind of sloppily made baskets to actually realizing their importance with the step towards Precision baskets but instead of going into that history I'm going to link some videos below one specifically by James Hoffman where he kind of talks about the history of VST and the the creation of kind of the the IMs the VST the Pullman baskets today what we're going to look at are these new players in the field starting with Doug Weber of Weber workshops he created the unifilter which was kind of a portafilter with the basket built

in so as you see it's a portafilter all made out of one piece of stainless steel and you have the holes right there but today we're not going to do a video on this mostly because this is the same geometry as the basket itself this is just a much bigger piece it's a hulking piece and I just did not feel like it kind of fit into the video today but following this he was planning on creating a basket that you could separate them from the portafilter so as he was making that we had another player

hop in the game wafo has made a Big Splash in creating their baskets they rushed these to the market and they now have four or five different geometries different hole patterns before Weber could get his unibasket out you have an announcement from sworks design that he too is making a basket and then about the same time you have Weber kind of release his in December of 2022. so now we went from none of these baskets to a multiplicity of options within a matter of a few months which is a great thing for home Baristas because

the more companies you kind of have in this race the cheaper and cheaper things tend to get as well as Innovation going up so right now for those of you unfamiliar the sticker price on these is right around 200 US dollars for a basket but is it worth it that's the question I'll be looking at today now before continuing I'm going to ask that you would take just a second hit the like hit the Subscribe I put a lot of time and effort in considering the basket I have spent multiple hundreds of dollars on them

and it would just be a fantastic thing if you hit the like And subscribe it really supports me and helps me go forward with this channel making the content up to Snuff essentially now in this video today I'm going to be looking at seven baskets specifically the wayfo single origin espresso classic and spirit the Weber unit filter the sworks design standard flow and I will be looking at the VST Precision IMS Barista Pro and the Pullman below I will have exhaustive time cues so that you can skip around to whatever test or whatever explanations you're

wanting to see because this will be a long video sit back and get ready for nerdiness all right the seven baskets that I now know intimately so first up I have the IMs Barista Pro now this has around 650 holes or so in the bottom of it and they are precisely cut and so we'll look at this in a little bit under a microscope so you can kind of see what's going on I got this for free but it was about five years ago from a latte art challenge that I ended up winning it was

like a six hour Throwdown and I won a linear mini and I won um a set of baskets next up we have the Pullman now this Pullman is the 19 to 22 Grand basket because I wanted 19 gram Doses and all of them to get about the same depth in all of these baskets so this is the 19 to 22 gram and it has 876 holes which gives it the name the Pullman 876 so I got this one I bought it from a European distributor next up we have the VST 20 grand basket which has

around 730 holes or so I bought this one from the same European distributor as I did the Pullman now next up is the single origin espresso classic from wafo this one I got for free from Brian Kwan a fellow YouTuber who also works on marketing wafo he sent me this as well as the blend uh the blend with the concentric Rings which I'm not going to be reviewing today because it's a little different from these but I got this one for free so heads up on that this soe spirit I paid for so what Brian

sent me did not include this and this was one that most people were asking me to go over so I ended up buying this for full price about 220 US dollars these two baskets by the way have around 3 000 holes on the bottom so quite a huge step up from the others and they're made from a non-magnetic stainless steel and if you notice they both have kind of a bevel in them so it goes down and there's a little beveled piece right here so they're not straight down the sides next up we have the

Swartz standard flow basket so the sports is about 200 which I did pay for full price and this one has about 12 or 1300 holes in the bottom and the holes are about 0.2 millimeters in width so we have this works right here and last up we have the Weber workshops unibasket now this one I did get for free added with my HD2 that I purchased this beauty right here so this one has about 1100 holes in the bottom and they're about 0.3 millimeters so they're a little bit bigger than the ones in this works

why there's a movement to this uh more hole coverage wider base kind of design so if you look between the two there's a massive obvious difference first of all is the base on these new ones is much wider okay so it comes out a lot further so usually in a basket the top opening is around 58 and a half millimeters where the top of the puck will be the bottom of the baskets typically are around 55 or 54 millimeters so that means the whole spread when you look at the outer hole to the outer hole

that means that hole spread is normally around 48 millimeters okay whenever you have the hole spread that is confined to the side well on the top you've got a few millimeters of coffee that doesn't have a direct Escape it can't go straight down which is the fastest path to exit it has to kind of go and curve and over concentrate the edges with other parts of the coffee that have to escape those edges so if we look if we have the edges here you see how much room of coffee there is onto the side all

of that coffee has to squeeze out that outer edge of holes so what you have is very often these this term called a donut shot which is the outer perimeter of coffee extracting first or so it would seem because it comes out of the bottom of the basket earlier and people for for a long time have recognized that as a negative thing a bad thing in your espresso Puck routines but contradictory to that Stefani ribis out in Belgium actually found out that that is still not extracting adequately the outer edges so donut shots actually help

with a more even extraction because those edges have nowhere to release it's actually a good sign when it comes out the edges first because it is showing that it's trying to keep keep up with the rest of the puck so in his experiments Stefani realized if you were to cut the puck with like a cookie cutter and measure the remaining solubles left in the Outer Edge versus the center the outer edge was much less extracted than the center because the center of the puck has the the smallest journey to get out it can go straight

through no problem whereas the edges like I said they have to kind of take a different path which can cause under extraction there's just nowhere for it to escape so the idea was instead of having kind of this funneled look of the basket which is actually better for knocking the puck out but instead of having this funnel look is to bring the walls out straight and bring the holes all the way to the edge and the idea is this would help with Edge extraction so that it would not be as under extracted I reached out

to IMS a couple of years ago before I met with them in Italy and asked if there was a way that they could make a basket with the wall straight down and holes to the edge this was based off some conversations I had had with Jonathan gagne the astrophysicist and so I was asking them about this if it was possible to bring holes all the way to the edge if we flattened the walls they didn't quite understand what I was asking so I presented it in person when I was at host in Milan in 2021

but after conversations they said they would make me prototype and then it never really happened because I think the the Machining of it is a little too difficult to do it in the way that they're making their baskets which is a much thinner metal with a lot simpler process in order to create the holes so being able to do holes to the edge the structural support of the basket itself just couldn't handle it is what I'm assuming but in any event it never materialized and so now we have these other players in the game with

Weber you have kind of a very uh Orthodox kind of approach where we're going for just as even of holes as possible with consistency so it took four years or so and was really playing with this idea of what's the ideal whole geometry is this ideal resistance or is it artificial resistance what are we doing when we're doing these baskets do we need to have Flex we not need to have Flex do we need to have straight edges beveled edges whatever it might be and he came out with this and then of course with wafo

you have them kind of playing around with more kind of geometries and more types of cuts and so they have their own CNC machine which is really interesting but what they're doing is is very unique to them they're making kind of slits kind of like what looks like little pieces of rice for their holes as opposed to a typical circular hole which is what you know swarks and Weber and everyone else kind of employs which are these circular holes when I was considering what would be the best approach to compare all of these I reached

out to one of my favorite scientists Dr simos Marque out in Zirk Switzerland and asked him what would be a good and helpful more objective way of kind of analyzing these baskets one of his suggestions was to dial them all into the same exact recipe and then measure the TDS and extraction yield of them in that recipe so I settled on a lightly roasted washed Ethiopia coffee and I dialed them into 19 grams in 45 grams out with a 30 second extraction there's a little margin of error there it was between 44 and 46 grams

and and between 29 and 31 seconds because I would have gone crazy trying to get it perfect every single time I used the zerno grinder with SSP hu Burrs inside of it I used the Linea micro and I did not use a bottom filter or a top filter I just wanted to see how these baskets would perform under just typical scenarios now it should be noted that when I measured the refractions here I did use VST filters for each of them so these are going to be pretty good accurate representations of the actual measurements a

lot of times you'll see people not using the filters and I've actually noticed there's differences depending on the coffee you're using and the way you're extracting and and the basket style it can skew differently so there's not a direct correlation between skus of using filtered and unfiltered samples sadly so it causes a lot more waste and testing but I wanted to have as accurate of results as possible now what's interesting is there seems to be a correlation between at least on the lower end baskets the whole count and the extraction yield so the IMs and

I don't want to make a false correlation that's why I'm providing the data but it's interesting to see that the least amount of holes in the IMs also produce the least extraction and as you increase in holes from 650s to 750s with the VST you also have a little tick up in average extraction and the same kind of tick happens between the VST and the Pullman which has the most number of holes for these cheaper baskets now once you move over to these ones that have a much bigger hole spread you see an increase in

extraction overall that kind of levels out now there are some variations but I didn't pull nearly enough shots to have a good enough sample size to see objectively which one extracts higher across the board I just did not have that many VST filters and those are not cheap so I think this is a good idea though and it shows that absolutely utilizing these newer style baskets does immediately give you higher extractions period now I do want to make one thing clear just because you have these new baskets does not make Puck preparation any easier I've

seen some claims that they're a lot more forgiving I have had the opposite experience well maybe not the opposite might be a strong word but I don't necessarily think they're more forgiving you're still going to be fighting and combating channeling in fact there's a lot I found a lot of difficulty in dialing some of these shots in I actually had a friend come over who's the current reigning Portuguese national barista champion Hui and I had him dial in coffees on all of these baskets and kind of give me his feeling on it now he found

that dialing in the VST the Pullman the IMs was a little bit easier than dying in the new ones which is to be expected it was his first time using these and there's a learning curve there but once he dialed in the newer ones even to similar ratios and recipes he was immediately preferring the taste of these more expensive ones with those higher extractions you do have more even extractions across the board which can result in tastier espresso now one of the big claims that I've seen a lot of people make and has actually been

marketed is that these baskets these more expensive ones don't flex now I will say wafo has come out and said there's duplex and I mean you can kind of see here there is a bin in the basket so they're not claiming that theirs doesn't Bend but there has been claims definitely with sworks and Weber that they don't bend what I have noticed is that this works one doesn't and it is is I don't know if it ever will um so as I'm sitting here swinging back and forth it is still flat as flat gets that

being said they all definitely Flex Under Pressure which is kind of the biggest claim there and you have the Weber one which has some Flex now in it as it's been used they kind of bow out just a little bit and kind of set in place now this Boeing happened within a few shots and then it's stayed constant since then when you look up close they all do Flex even this works one does flex when it's under pressure and one of the claims was if it flexes it can cause cracking in the puck well they

all Flex so that's kind of a moot point now something that I think is interesting to look at is the actual whole spread we're gonna just take some calipers and we'll take a look at that right now the top opening of these baskets are around 58.8 okay so 58.5 was where the puck normally goes as it tapers in the bottom on the wafo is 58.5 from edge to edge the whole spread is about 53.3 okay so that's what we kind of have on these wafos let me double check this one yep 53 3. now the

sworks 588 inside it's hard for me to measure the base right here but from the outside to the outside it's about 60 millimeters so the top that doesn't mean it gets bigger at the bottom that's the outside I was measuring inside on the top and then outside so the fact that this one goes down to 58 shows that it is quite a bit smaller two millimeters in fact then the base of this one from outside to outside from hole to Hole edge to edge we're at 57.7 roughly so almost any uh almost completely covered so

if you have 58.5 as that top part of your Puck you have 57.7 ish on the bottom part which is almost full spread so all of that coffee has complete freedom to leave the puck in a straight fashion with the Weber the top we have 588 as per usual and then the base is 60.7 and the whole spread is 56.5 so this works has a little bit more of a hole spread and just to kind of I'm sure you're wondering about these other baskets we'll just quickly show you the whole spread there the whole spread

on the IMs is 4729 the Pullman is right at 50 and then the VST is right at 50 as well a lot less hole spread on those so you're having a lot more of that concentration around the Outer Perimeter which which obviously seems to be cured in kind of these over here now I'm going to link an article below by a friend of mine Shay that he did a little comparison of the wafo versus a Pullman and did a little different angle than the testing I did and so I'm going to recommend you check that

out but I'll have that down below in the caption now all right and where to go [Music] all right so we have the microscope that I bought literally for this video so that we can take a closer look at these now let me go ahead and start off by saying I don't necessarily think that what we're getting into has that much barring on the end result of what is actually going to happen in extraction but it could I and so we're going to take a look we're going to discuss it and then we'll kind of

put uh move forward so let's go ahead and start with the kind of Cheaper baskets we're going to start with the IMs the Barista Pro so there you see one of the holes on the VST so you see there's a like kind of a cone shape surrounding the hole they say this helps to not block the exits so you can see the holes are pretty pretty well rounded they're not very Jagged they look pretty good there's not really a spot for coffee to kind of get stuck these are of course machined holes all right so

later on we'll see laser cut holes and we'll be able to kind of decide what we think is better but what you can see there is is you know pretty clean holes so we're going to kind of move on to the VST and this is they kind of um set themselves up as you know being Precision baskets they were the kind of the first to really push through with this Precision idea and so what we're going to see here are some really nicely precise holes really nice cut holes so you can kind of see here

there's a little bit of tooling marks around the edges just like there was on the uh on the IMs but still really nicely nice looking holes and very very evenly spread apart so that's one of the big things that's really important is same size holes with even spread which this does a pretty good job of but of course it can be it can be different from batch to batch but the good news is is none of these are ever going to be are ever going to have any blocked holes there they have pretty precise quality

control and so you're never going to have a blocked hole but to be honest with you a lot of these baskets now even the cheaper ones you're not really going to get any blocked holes uh ones that aren't fully cut out there's that's just not really um if you're buying something that's decently built at all so next up we'll look at the Pullman which the Pullman's actually super impressive as well it has the same standard um at least under the microscope as the VST but what we'll notice are these holes are even smaller so the

VST holes were a little bit bigger than this and then even bigger than that were the IMs holes so IMS has the biggest holes in VST than Pullman which obviously makes sense considering the whole count with around 650 or so for IMS around 727.40 with VST and around 876 with the Pullman so as you see here these are really clean cuts we're right on that P that's engraved on the inside that's what this is so now I have a surprise basket and I want you to kind of look at this and decide if you think

these are nicely cut holes or if you think they're shabby so we have the hole right there and then you see the spacing not many not not too bad of tooling marks there I mean about the same as VST honestly when you look at it closely see that so really nice uh really highly precise hole Cuts here but this is a stock Breville basket and it is made essentially to the same precision as VST according to them I'd heard this before and I never really challenged it because I didn't really know how but wow first

off I was able to get really great shots with the Breville baskets which they don't have as many holes as a VST they're in the 600s like IMS so they're more comparable to that but the holes are smaller which is uh closer to the VST so you have here a really nice Basket in the Breville so if you're looking in this realm the Breville actually does a great job and once you start using those bottom paper filters as I've advocated for in previous videos and in this one you're really going to get an incredible espresso

without breaking the bank these are like five six euros something like that so this is I have a huge stamp of approval for these and then if you go watch Thomas greens the wired gourmets video he um he thinks that the profitec I believe it was their their base baskets are really nice as well um in his in his little breakdown of them so I'm all for great budgets uh bang for your buck granted I don't think these are as good as the Pullman baskets which I think are my favorite cheaper baskets and I think

it's a lot to do with the whole spread the amount of holes um and it's precisely cut so we have the soe spirit right here which this one's going to have those rice looking slits in it so as you see right there let's get a little bit more clarity there we are so as you see here kind of the quality of the cuts are not as high as the quality in the other ones and I think a lot of it's to do with kind of the funky shape this is I'm not sure how the cuts

are made I doubt it's with a laser but if it is I guess the vibrations for making this shape it would kind of make sense as to why they're so kind of inconsistent one of my big issues with this is and you can see it right here well there's another example is because of like how Jagged they are you get little coffee Flex stuck in it and these can cause different clogs in these holes so as I scan around look there's another one is these skin there's some more coffee caught and right before I started

this filming with this microscope I had done a cathesia bath on all of the baskets so it's not even really removing a lot of these coffee grounds that are getting stuck on those imprecisely cut holes which is going to affect your espresso flow through the basket next up we have the soe classic so these are similar they have the kind of rice pattern but they're a little bit smaller so they're like so there you go they're elongated kind of oval type holes and again you have little flecks of coffee that stick but as you can

see they're all imprecisely cut which again I'm not sure how much that matters especially with how many holes there are it could be a moot point but it does kind of for me personally when I look at it like this and I see how imprecise it is it kind of just gives me pause on maybe the longevity of it maybe it's going to bow out more they they already feel a little cheaper and that's probably because of my ignorance on the different stainless steel types but it's a it's a non-magnetic stainless steel that isn't polished

finished and so it just doesn't have that premium feel that this works in the Weber do and so on top of that having these really imprecisely cut holes kind of I don't know just it's kind of funky so we have Weber up next and then we'll finish with sworks so these are laser ablated holes laser cut so the consistency should be through the roof should be a really nice consistency from basket to basket which is difficult to do when you're kind of Machining and that's why you have those scores that come in on the VST

cards when you order VST basket but these should not have any issue all of them should be about the same distance like identically not about but identically so you have a little rough edges rougher obviously than the Pullman of VST because those are Machining you just can't really match that with lasers because they're vibrating right but uh really nice holes here and like I said a polished finish so looks really good on the inside as well and then we have sworks right here up so there's there's a coffee uh piece of coffee right there let's

get a close-up of that so coffee is blocking that hole almost entirely but for the most part oh there's another one these are really small holes like they're like I said they're about 33 smaller than Weber's so it's up and there's another one that's interesting I've not actually had this many issues with uh coffee particles clogging the holes before on this one it's about the same cut style cut holes as the Weber uh same jaggedness because like I said it's lasered laser cut so it is what it is but anyway those that's kind of the

up close looks of each of those again keep in mind that that the the jaggedness might have no barring on it other than kind of getting clogged and since the holes on the wafer are so small they are there's more likelihood of those getting clogged more often and probably a little bit more annoying to clean but again I'm just kind of speculating if you order this the wafos they have I found they fit in all the portafilters I have they because they are beveled at the end so they're not they're not giving the full range

that maybe the Weber and the sworks do which I have noticed give me consistently more even a little higher extractions um these two have those beveled bottoms but it allows it to fit in Split Porta filters and you can use kind of stock Springs when you're putting the basket in so if you just have you know a normal portafilter you can fit it in with the stock spring but the same cannot be said about the Weber and the sworks so we have the web right here it will not fit because it doesn't have that bevel

so it's not wanting to fit into that stock spring same thing with the sworks and so Weber actually ships with a new spring this works doesn't fit either so they strip with a new spring it's very simple to replace you just pull your spring out and you replace it with the spring that they give you and then it'll fit nice and tidy granted what should be noted is neither the Swartz nor the Weber can fit in every portafilter because they have that six a little over 60 millimeter base so you need to have a portafilter

that's not coming in concave on the center it needs to be straight down so there are some compatibility issues and I believe they both give measurements on their website so you can measure your Port filter at home and ensure that it's going to fit Now quickly I'm going to show you kind of the weights of each and this is just one way to kind of see the like how premium they are how how thick they are and because these this is going to kind of contribute to the the longevity of these baskets one of the

claims is that they should last a lot longer in a cafe setting than normal baskets so they need to essentially out outlive five of these baskets in order to really justify the cost because the the one thing I've noticed people is missing is the main kind of Market the main idea behind these baskets is for a commercial setting wafo has stated that explicitly Weber has stated that explicitly I'm not quite quite sure if sworks has really taken aside on it but that it's more so geared towards a commercial setting so that you can have a

more even extraction without having to use a bottom paper filter now if you're curious about bottom paper filters I have this video with Jonathan gagne where we discuss kind of the benefits of that in the Pullman with a bottom filter you had almost the same extraction yields as these so you can immediately improve your espresso by adding a bottom paper filter to your basket because it's opening up surface area for that espresso to extract and Escape so first up we have the IMs which weighs right at 30.25 grams the Pullman 36 grams VST 36 grams

just shy of the soe classic is at 50 the soe spirit is at 48 the sworks is at 47 and the Weber is at 58. so the the heaviest is definitely the Weber now this one is cut from 1.2 millimeter thick steel so it's a very thick steel I know the VST is about 0.53 millimeters in thickness on the base so this is a little bit more than double the thickness I'm not sure on the measurements of these the wafo definitely feels a little thinner than that but I can't really speculate more on that the

swirks also maybe maybe is more similar but um as far as robustness goes these two definitely feel their most robust out of all these baskets let's get into taste this is the most subjective of what I'm going to be talking about obviously showing that there is still Flex even in these baskets is not really an arguable thing now what is arguable obviously is taste but I'm going to go ahead and try to communicate that as clearly as possible to you all what is that exactly is going on now again referring to my friend who came

over and tasted with me his his preferences were the soe spirit and the Weber workshops unibasket these were the two that he found kind of the best coffees from the most balance he said he got from the unibasket and kind of the most exciting coffee he got from the hear it so I'm going to dial in the VST and then we'll replicate that on the other baskets and see how the taste changes foreign so I'm just cooling down some of these hotter ones so that they're all at the same drinking temperature by the time I

go through and taste of course let me make absolutely clear this is not the first time I am tasting these so whatever I say here is backed by a lot of tastings that I have done behind the scenes over the last few months the experiment that I did only took one day mostly what I was doing is loads of testing loads of tasting and so this is more so a reflection of all that time so I'm not blinding this this is a ton of espresso so I'm going to kind of take my time go through

it and describe to you kind of the differences again what I did here is I I dialed in these baskets for 19 and 45 out so 25 to 26 seconds and then I just pulled these at the same grind size this one without a basket is the VST with a paper filter so we're going to see how that Stacks up now I've taken a few samples of some of these to kind of refract them I don't have my filters in anymore so they will be unfiltered but considering they're the same coffee and everything else they

should give us an idea not of necessarily their exact extraction yield but relative to one another I have one from here the one with the paper and I took one of the wafos and this works and we're just going to kind of compare that so anyway I'm gonna go through and taste these now that they're essentially at the same temp after all that stirring okay there's still a three temp diff from the first to the last but as I sit down the line we should essentially equal out got my water let's get the tasting this

is the IMs juicy sweep a little bit of an accurate finish I'm pretty sick this is the Pullman deeper sweetness more of the sugar Browning notes coming through a little bit more pleasant of a finish we have EST this one's brighter has a similar sweetness it's pretty balanced but the most balance of those was definitely the Pullman but all three really nice shots with a pretty I mean it's a pretty nice coffee that I have going on here this is a VST with paper so this should essentially give us something much more similar to these

because we're opening up more of that surface area again I'm going to reference that video I do with Jonathan gagne talking about um this uh this trick of putting paper filters on the bottom that is that is juicy we're getting the sweetness we're getting the body we're getting the juiciness we're getting some florals coming through and we're not getting that that kind of accurate finish it tastes like a more even extraction overall next up is the single origin espresso classic that's very bright much brighter than anything thus far but not unobtrusively so not not like

um not like a sharp sour uh bright but it is very bright a lot less sweetness next is the spirit which by the way these ran in like 18 to 20 seconds because there's a lot less resistance so a lot less of the basket resistance because how many more holes or how much more opening there is so this is giving you a lot more artificial resistance these are giving you much more um or much less actual resistance if that makes sense so this one's more syrupy heavier sweetness heavier body than the classic it does a

really good job with this um with this coffee it's it's not making it out to be sharp acidic which is actually surprising because I would have assumed with how people are uh praising the soe spirit that perhaps it was more on the bright side more on the floral side but this one actually had a more syrupy uh syrupy Sweetness in the classic I'll be honest with you though I haven't told I haven't been able to tell a massive difference between these two the biggest difference is the whole shape and so I think if people are

really you know saying that there's a big difference taste wise between these two probably blowing some smoke but um there's definitely uh in in this situation there is a big difference but I don't think that's necessarily how it works every time and it hasn't in my experience so next up we're gonna do the sworks and then we'll finish with the Weber huh that's a very good shot um so far out of these this one had been my favorite actually the VST with the paper filter while these were good and this one particularly good this one

just seemed to have more of a juicy roundedness to it you had you had um you were able to get some of the florality you're able to get the the sweetness you were able to get the acidity without kind of losing structure um whereas it was not in these this one was close but it did actually mute to the acidity a lot more than I would have liked um that I was able to get in this the sports one was really nice it had a good sweetness but it tasted a little imbalanced towards that let's

see what the Weber is like this one essentially gave us what this works had with more acidity but there is a little bit of a um a finish on it that's not completely ideal so in my tastings I've been able to tell consistently the difference between these and these so yes the difference is there and yes the extraction Gap is massive but again I think one of the biggest advantages of this outside of the nerdy people who are feel like spending 200 bucks at home because I think you can get a lot of the long

way there with just bottom paper filters so I think this is huge for cafes I read someone's experience that was saying they've implemented some of the wafos in their Cafe which it could be said for any of these and what they've experienced is faster shot times without compromising quality and having more even extractions which absolutely follows through and makes sense these were 19 second shots and they had texture and everything else that these had in fact they were comparable on texture and these were longer shots so we had the texture we had the taste we

had the sweetness we had the roundedness we had all of these different characteristics that is difficult to get in kind of these standard baskets so is there a difference yes is it noticeable yes I think that most of you would actually be able to tell the difference on this table right now with the contact time and everything else they're probably uh quite similar so now I'm going to turn to those um readings with the VST refractometer and we'll kind of see roughly where they're sitting at the IMs was at about a 20.2 percent extraction yield

again unfiltered so it's probably lower the VST with the paper filter was sitting on just shy of 21 at 20.8 percent extraction the next was the wafo spirit which was sitting at 22.1 percent and then finally the sworks basket was sitting at 22.5 percent and what's shocking is there's there is that big gap in the extraction even though the time was a lot less so I thought that they would be more even an extraction but actually even at 19 seconds the ones with the massive uh hole spread on the bottom were extracting a lot higher

and a lot more efficiently than the other others were which is a huge Advantage so if you take into account you're in a cafe setting you can trim five to ten seconds off your your shot times you're able to get more even extractions more consistently and you're going to have arguably a more more longevity out of your basket now does that make it worth it that's definitely up to you the person at home I can't really speak to if it's worth two hundred dollars so buy three 600 bucks to fill a three group machine if

that's worth it for your Cafe I don't know what I can tell you though is there is a massive difference in taste and that is what I care about mostly now for those of you at home is this worth it well in a cafe it's not possible to put a bottom paper filter in every basket it's going to waste a ton of paper it's going to take a lot of time in your workflow in order to replicate what these baskets can give without bottom filters but at home the difference there is a is is is

is smaller than it is going from a VST for instance to a swirks or a unibasket the difference is smaller if you're adding a paper filter to the bottom of your basket so do you need this no try it with your bottom paper filters if that becomes a nuisance if you see that the upside of having one of these baskets is better than using bottom paper filters then sure by all means grab one but I would not say you need to you know inject yourself with your gear acquisition syndrome and go out and buy this

just because you need to have the latest and the greatest these are definitely geared more towards commercial settings and obviously to the home Geeks that really want to pull out every single percent of extraction they can these will do that they are giving you more ability to extract that higher percentages but again there are other ways of increasing your extraction I know that decent espresso has just released a new a new dispersion system in their decent espresso machine that is actually proving to increase Edge extraction as well so you have capabilities of from above and

From Below to increase your extraction so if you've skipped to the conclusion welcome I'm I'm excited you're here even though you missed out a lot of the work that I've been putting into this video but welcome regardless well I'm going to kind of do a wrap up right now out of these seven baskets uh were essentially boiled down there is a clear delineation between the expensive ones and the cheaper ones and it's because of that extraction being boosted due to the opening of those of that edge extraction now of course there's still going to be

channels you're going to fight it's not a magic pill that is automatically going to make you the best Barista ever because you now have these baskets you're still going to have a lot of opportunity for channels arguably more so than before and it's going to show the channeling a lot more so what do I mean by that well in your typical basket the bottom is going to flex a lot more as you saw on those slow-mo up closest these Flex quite a bit and they actually stay quite bold that's why you can kind of spin

it like that right so it's quite a bowed basket which is going to allow a convalescence of those streams into the middle really quickly as some marketing is rat tail right so you have that coming to the center a lot more quickly and especially if you're using a darker roasted coffee or a really fresh coffee the adhesion that's going on underneath with all of those oils and gases is going to hide your channels there's always channeling in your espresso no matter what you can wdt you can sit there and tap you can Tamp with an

800 tamper you're gonna have channeling I'm sorry that's reality when you're grinding this finely so let's get that let's get that out of the way now you might see less channeling but that doesn't mean there's less channeling it just means that the channeling is happening near the center where it's being enveloped into that that tail that stream uh the convalescence of all those lick of all the liquids kind of coming out it's just hiding it better okay the darker roast you use the less Channel you're going to see the lighter roast the more you're going

to see so don't sit there and act like there's no chain there is now it's going to look a lot uglier with these other baskets especially the more rigid they are so for instance in the unibasket and in the sworks the shots are going to look really ugly the lighter the coffee you're using if you're using really lightly roasted coffees like a pollen's gold or you're using say or you're use using April or you're using mood trap or something like that what's going to happen is you're going to have what is called like reigning of

the streams you're gonna have multiple streams coming out and even if you run it for a minute they may not coalesce into the center they may just continue to drip the whole time and that's that's fine that's not a big deal and it's because the Bottom's not bending nearly as much and because the space is so wide adhesion may not be as strong because of how light your coffee is there's not as much going on the darker the coffee the more you're going to probably have that stream and you can see that in some of

the videos I've posted on my Instagram where you I use a darker coffee in order to show how these baskets are working and they do end up coalescing all of them so you're not going to just have drips all over the place if you're using a dark coffee so the basket's not broken the the language is not incorrect necessarily if you're not having rain the whole time it depends on the darkness of your roast and the freshness of your roast I think it's pretty obvious especially from the microscope that these tend to these seem to

be a little bit more premium in their build they're all about the same price point Weber is actually the cheapest which might be because of scaling or something like that but these the holes look pretty rough on their cutting and I'm hoping they might improve the quality of that because I do get coffee grounds stuck in these holes quite often which can skew your extraction so these just they feel a little bit um yeah they just feel like they're not as well made and the the perforations on the inside for the names I'm not a

fan of because it's just it gets in my head that something might be going on both of these opted for a polished finish on the inside and there's no there's no Engravings or anything they put that on the bottom so there's nothing really that could be going on inside that is outside of the ordinary um I I have preferred overall in my blind testing shots from these they tend to be a lot more balanced with a lot higher sweetness these um honestly they are hitting higher extractions but they tend to be less balanced and a

little bit more accurate at least in my experience now again I know a lot of people that are really obsessed with the spirit and I do think it's a great basket I think all of these do a good job for what they're doing and I am very excited about all the different areas that wafo is taking these new designs they're they're playing around with multiple different scenarios multiple different geometries whole patterns and things like that but how much of those are actually needed I don't know I think a lot of it is just kind of

like playing with hole patterns and seeing what happens which is probably what we have to do similar to bird geometry just kind of play with different shaped teeth kind of like what time war did with their turbo burst and you kind of hope that it works these though we know they both work and they do they produce really nice shots so I am a huge fan of this trend going forward I really hope that more and more manufacturers start to look into this and try to make it for cheaper you don't need it it will

improve your consistency so what that means is out of 10 shots maybe eight of them will be fantastic as opposed to maybe five of them those are just random numbers don't read into those now as far as putting mesh screens on top I like doing that for cleanliness of machines but I've still not been shown any data to to suggest it does anything to your extraction and so what I've actually been using so that I can have a bigger dose these thin screens from sworks normally what you see people using what I also use are

these mesh screens but these are very difficult to clean I do love them if I need to lessen the headspace with a smaller dose or if I'm using the decent I always use it to lessen the headspace to give me more texture but if you want to if you already are running out of headspace these do a great job they're really thin incredibly thin Sheldon graciously sent these with my basket which I did pay full price for okay oh good grief I'm like 800 in the hole on this video and I know it was a

marathon I know this is like movie night and I know that you probably skipped to here so if you would if you would take the moment hit the like hit the Subscribe because I put so much effort in these videos that would just be so helpful even if you just copy the link of this video that counts as a Sharon and it helps it helps boost my algorithm so if you just think to you know copy just copy the link it will count that as engagement and it would it just helps me so much thank

you for bearing with me through this whole thing and I really hope that you enjoyed the content anyway I'm very caffeinated from sipping all those espressos so I need to go take a walk or something but while I'm doing that I hope that you brew something tasty today and cheers