There has been an assumption in the world of espresso that there is no performance difference between ridged and ridgeless baskets. I wanted to examine this claim just in case it was a bad assumption because I haven’t seen any data on it. So I bought a ridgeless VST basket to compare to my ridged basket.
Long story short: I didn’t find a performance difference in taste or extraction across multiples roasts and shots, but the caveat is that I had only one basket sample of each type.
I did an initial simulation below about water flow. It was a bit extreme, but I felt it justified the look. A notch caused such a wild change to the flow of the shot, and in reality, it probably didn’t have that big of an effect, but I wasn’t sure. To me, I’m trying to isolate problem sources so I can fix them.

#coffee #food #data #data-science #espresso