Barista tools & portafilter holders

Start with the size of your portafilter. Almost all professional machines and most better home machines use 58 mm, and the dosing cups, blind filters and separate portafilters here are built for that. If your machine has a different size, measure the inner diameter of the basket first.

After that you look at what you are missing, in the order of brewing. A WDT tool with thin needles breaks up the clumps that freshly ground coffee forms through static charge. A dosing cup catches the grounds so nothing falls beside the basket. A scale with a timer records how much goes in and comes out. A blind filter is a basket without holes and you need it for cleaning. A second portafilter is not a luxury but time gained: while one runs, you fill the other. For tamping itself, look at the tampers.

Catch the grounds in the dosing cup, work through them for ten seconds with the WDT tool until there are no clumps left, then tap the cup out into the basket. Level the surface and only then tamp. A tilted or lumpy coffee bed lets the water run through the weakest spot, which makes the shot taste thin while the rest of the coffee is still full.

Weighing then gives you something to hold on to. Eighteen grams in, thirty-six grams out, in twenty-five to thirty seconds, is the usual starting point from which you adjust. If it runs through too fast, grind finer. For the milk side look at the milk jugs, and if you want to turn your espresso into a cocktail, the ratio is on the espresso martini page.

Coffee oils go rancid, and that is a matter of days rather than weeks. With a blind filter you run a backflush: the machine pumps the water back through the group and flushes the residue out. Do that at the end of every service and within a week you will taste the difference in the first shot of the day.

A group brush takes the grit out from under the shower screen, a steam wand brush keeps milk residue out of the wand. Milk that dries inside the wand gives a burnt taste to the next cappuccino. So wipe the wand with a cloth straight after every use and purge it. The knock box for the used puck is with the knock boxes.

With the tools in place and the glassware still to find, the single- and double-walled models are with the coffee glasses. If you mainly serve milk drinks, the latte macchiato glasses are the logical step, with the height that keeps the layers visible. And if you would rather work with cold coffee than with milk, that starts with the espresso tonic.