The Sect of Rama

I've been using the same espresso machine for a while now, but about a year ago shelved the hand grinder for a Rocky doserless. The combination produces very good shots when I have a good roast, but on occasion, I get a bad extraction when I know the beans are fine, the grind is fine, and the distribution and tamping felt fine. In an effort to get some answers, I decided to convert my portafilter to a bottomless by removing the material below the basket.

Its an obvious next step, but I've held off for a while because I feared it would be difficult to produce decent results without a drill press or dedicating a whole afternoon (the most common approach based on my quick research seems to be drilling a series of holes until the bottom almost falls out, a horribly messy and laborious task.) However once I looked closer, and realized the portafilter is made of soft brass, it was obvious I had a much better tool for the task, a jigsaw:



After clamping the portafilter to a bench, I drilled a couple of pilot holes (the first one wasn't close enough to the wall for my liking), then just let the jigsaw blade follow the inside wall around the circumference. The photo above shows this process half way through, at which point I repositioned the portafilter at a different angle to better reach the other half. Once the center was removed, I used a Dremel (a tool I once used to cut holes in 3/4" ply, I'll admit) with a grinding bit to clean up the rough edges. It literally took 5 minutes to complete.

The results? The first shot I pulled was a spurter, something that may have shown itself as blonding pre-bottomless, or maybe not at all. I thought it was the result of underfilling the basket, so on the second shot, I added more coffee and repeated. Bingo! Near perfect looking extraction (pictured at top), awesome crema, delicious shot. Apparently eyeballing the fill-level doesn't cut it when you bounce back and forth between different types of beans and roast levels every few shots- some clump more than others due to static electricity and perhaps other factors. I'll be using my scale more while switching beans until I get this under control. And definitely look forward to the immediate feedback I get via the bottomless portafilter. Why manufacturers don't make them standard these days in a mystery.