In this video, I want to walk you through - with Paul - the range of baskets that we have.
Roughly, I would group them into the 15, 18, maybe even the 20g baskets,
being the most current, used in the new thinking on espresso,
with the 15g basket being more for medium to dark roasts
and 18 and 20 more for light.
This is a portafilter basket, and you can take it out just like that,
there's a spring that holds it in, and put it in.
And then there's another way to take it out,
and that's if you have another basket, you just wedge it in like this and take it out.
And the reason I mention that is a lot of people don't realize they can actually change their basket.
The Decent ships with an 18g basket,
and the other most common basket that we sell is the 15g.
The 15g basket is the basket I use most often,
because I tend to drink coffees that are medium-light roasts to medium-dark roasts...
I am a little bit more of a lighter roast guy,
so I kind of prefer to lean more towards the 18g,
I just find that the puck is a little bit more forgiving.
Yeah and the other thing is that the hole size on a 15g basket is slightly smaller than the 18g basket,
and that goes in both directions.
The bigger the basket, the hole size is calibrated for it,
and the reason for that is that generally, when you get a smaller basket,
you want actually a slower flow in espresso.
So smaller baskets, darker roasts,
larger baskets, lighter roasts,
and faster flow, so the hole size goes along with that dose.
Obviously, it's also part of the fact that the bigger the basket, the thicker the puck,
and making the hole a little bit bigger
compensates for the increased resistance in that puck.
This one is the ridgeless, and this one is the ridged.
So I have to explain just briefly what that is.
This little ridge is here, and as I am moving my hand over it, you can hear it snapping.
That is meant to catch on this spring that's right here,
so when I slide this in,
it stops and I have to push in, and you can hear it snap.
And then when I take it out, I have to overcome the resistance of the spring.
So it's a little bit of work to get in there,
and the reason that that's like that is so that when you bang on a knockbox,
the basket stays locked in.
A lot of home baristas like to change their baskets for different coffees,
and so the idea for a ridgeless basket has come out,
and that's easier to slide in, it just slides in like that.
When you bang on a knockbox, they don't tend to come out,
the spring is using friction to hold it.
But it's super easy, because you can just slide it out.
A lot of people like to hold this right under their grinder spout
and just grind directly into the basket,
do the various things, tamp and then put it in.
That is something that I think is a bit fussy,
but it is a thing that a lot of people do.
I would say that the expert coffee world is moving toward ridgeless baskets,
and so are we.
So at the moment, all our baskets are available in a ridged format,
and as we re-order each basket,
we're offering it in ridged and ridgeless, and probably eventually just ridgeless.
The ridge on the outside translates to a slight divid on the inside,
and there, often a little bit of coffee gets stuck in there,
so that when you tamp, there's a little bit of coffee there.
That upsets some people.
Yes.
And they're sure they get a better extraction without the ridged.
Now, that may or may not be the case, I don't know.
Certainly I would say it can't hurt the extraction to get rid of the ridge.
Now, next in our arsenal are the whole group of baskets that are 20, 22 and 24g.
Now, those are for larger doses and generally for lighter roasts.
A lot of the trends we've seen in the coffee world,
we see a lot of, let's say the single origins that have come out,
we see a general trend that they generally overdose those baskets,
filling them almost to the brim and extracting that way.
There's a couple of reasons for that, working with the limitations of the machine,
for one in that they kind of control flow rate,
so they use a basket to help with that.
It just creates that extra volume and puck depth to help you with your extractions.
If you have a 9 bar machine, the speed of the espresso extractions is going to speed up
over the course of that 10, 20, 30 seconds.
Now, the reason that's important is if you have a light roast
that is going to turn acidic or has odd grassy notes or other flavors you don't like
the way to get rid of those nasty flavors is to make a shorter shot.
But if you make a shorter shot with a 15g basket, well you have barely anything to drink.
The most common technique - especially in the previous decade -
for making light roasts taste good
was to put 20, even 24g in
and then extract even 0.8, like 24 in, and like 20 out.
That would be extreme, but I have seen all the time 24 in, and like 24, 26 out,
and it makes delicious espresso.
I'll also say that the 20g baskets are extremely common in cafés,
and the reason is that the baristas are working so quickly, their tamping is inconsistent,
and that ticker puck makes the coffees more consistent.
In other words they're less likely to channel when there's more stuff there.
So faster workflow, but also, if you're seeing inconsistencies with our 9 bar machine,
a larger does is definitely going to help.
If you have a pressure profiling machine, the larger doses aren't so much needed,
because you're going to calibrate your machine
to have a descending pressure profile as the shot continues
and so that sourness and that channeling that would happen is not really an issue.
And that's why with the Decent and other pressure profiling machines,
you tend to see people go for 15, 18, sometimes 20g baskets.
At Decent, our focus has really been on clarity of flavor,
and we've really been on the light to medium-light roast world.
That's what we focused for the last 7 years.
But now, we've been spending the last year or so really focusing on body,
like what makes for a shot that's really easy to drink,
thick and easy to pull,
just something you'd drink 3, 4, 5 times a day like the Italians do.
We have a slightly waisted, a very waisted and an extremely waisted basket,
and these come in 14g dose and a 12g dose.
Now, the reason why we have a 14 and a 14 is
the slightly waisted and very waisted baskets both taste great with 14g doses,
but going to very waisted, I believe, gives you something that's a bit simpler in the mouth
but more consistent and more chocolatey and thicker.
It's kind of more what you would be used to in a more Italian, traditional café.
It won't be the best espresso in the world,
but it's very, very easily achievable and very satisfying.
Yes, I was getting to that. It's not so much brain, it's just "mhrrr", I like it.
The 12g basket is something that's new here at Decent,
it's something Paul's worked on quite a lot.
What we really wanted to see was what was the smallest dose that we could put into a coffee basket
and actually consistently make really good espresso.
So the 7g basket looks like no other basket we make.
You can see it's extremely waisted,
it's this basket starts at 58mm, and I believe it goes down to 41mm down there.
And 7g is tiny, I mean it's half the 14g dose, which is already quite small.
The very itine way of doing this this is you fill it, and you tamp, and it channels like mad.
It's not a delicious coffee, they often pull it Ristretto,
and what we did is develop a tamper that worked around the problems with this basket.
And namely what you've got is a 41mm tamper inside a 58mm tamper.
And what that lets you do is to put a tiny dose inside here and keep it in there.
So you can think of the 7g basket as essentially a tiny basket inside a larger basket,
just as this is a tiny tamper inside a larger tamper.
This is for people who really want to make coffee in the old Italian tradition;
they want to make a single espresso with a 7g dose.
And we think we can pull it off, but I wouldn't recommend this for anything except a dark roast.
Unless you really wanted a challenge, I would stick to the larger baskets.
This is a 10g basket, and it's similar to our 15g basket, only a little bit shorter.
I would say this is for someone who really, really wants to go into the 10g basket world,
that's like that's you figured something out and it's working for you,
I would say here we haven't figured it out.
This is a basket that we don't use as often.
We manufacture it so that we have the whole historical lineage of baskets,
the 10g basket is definitely an important part of history,
but I wouldn't say it's an important part of today's new thinking about espresso.
So those are our espresso baskets,
and now I am going to talk about a few different kinds of baskets that we make as well.
So here we have the pour over basket.
Now, this is a basket with very few holes;
there's 3 holes in the center, and 6 holes on the outside.
And this is for putting a V60 pour over vessel underneath it,
and it squirts out like a shower at home would on this.
So I've been talking about it in this video since it is a basket, but it is not an espresso basket.
Continuing on the weird and unusual baskets, this is our 2 puck simulator baskets.
So, again, these are not really for making espressos.
What these do is simulate as if you were making an espresso,
and these holes - there's a 0.2 and a 0.3 -
they will give you what is more or less a medium to dark roast emulation,
that's the 0.2 hole,
and a lighter roast would be around the 0.3 hole.
That corresponds to about a 1.2ml flow rate for the dark and a 2.0ml flow rate for the lighter roast.
And if you're more focused on light roasts,
I would say the 18g to 24g baskets would be the ones that would be the most interesting to you.
Now, Paul, we also had a discussion as to if you don't own Decent, if you own indecent baskets,
what would you be looking for to think that maybe these would improve your coffee?
For sure, I would be actually doing a slightly strange thing and looking at the holes in front of the light.
This is a really good check, especially when you're, you know, doing group head cleaning
while it's back flushing, you know, just hold up the holes and see if you can see anything
that may be ununiform, or, perhaps you can even look at the base
and see how flat your actual base of your basket is.
Over time, because of the pressures that the baskets do receive,
they will start to, sort of, bow out a little bit.
That could affect your extractions in the form of side extractions, which is what we just touched upon.
You can test this out. If you normally tamp one way and you see it coming out at one side,
just turn it over around and put it in and see if the lower end of the basket where it sort of concaved a bit
is that the area where the coffee is coming out first.
And if you can confirm that,
that's a good sign to sort of say, "mh maybe I should consider trying a different basket
to see if it's affecting my extractions," or "I just need to change my basket completely."
One of the signs of a poorly made basket is it's quite light.
And you'll just physically weigh maybe a Decent basket next to another one,
and you'll see "oh my God, it's quite light."
Now why does that matter?
It matters because if you actually push on the bottom here,
you'll actually find that cheap baskets will bend.
Now, if they bend in your hand, you can bet that they will bend under 140 psi (9.8429 kg/cm²) of pressure
which is what an espresso's being made at.
Another thing about our baskets is that the inside diameter is punched out to a very specific tolerance,
and we recommend that you get a tamper that is 58.4mm in diameter.
You can go all the way to 58.55mm,
and we have made tampers like that,
but if you do that, you risk that you might suck out the puck.
So our baskets and our tampers are all optimized for a 58.40mm tamper,
which are widely available from us and other sources.
Thanks for listening to us talk about our baskets.