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I’m running into some interesting things with this basket. Where I can consistently get a nice, single-spout shot pulled with the basket that came with my normcore bottomless portafilter, that basket starts tapering about halfway down the basket.

This caused issues where I couldn’t play with tamping pressure as much as I’d like to, as the tamper would stop halfway into the basket, even if I felt like there was a lot more air that could be gotten out of the puck.

Enter the IMS basket above. In looking at the two, I notice that there are both more holes in the IMS basket than in my normcore basket, and also the hole diameter seems to be about 25% bigger.

If anyone has ideas about what I could try for puck prep to improve this, I’m all ears.

Using the basket:

I’m grinding to hit 103g which (subtracting the weight of my dosing cup) is 18g. Here’s a look at post WDT Tool, immediately before tamping:

This is what a tamper looks like. Also, how far I pushed down before stopping, although I’m sure tamper base thickness is variable between tampers:

The top of the tamper sides just barely rise over the edge of the basket.

Here’s the puck prep completed:

Now, the interesting bit. Take a look at how this basket pulls a shot:

Interestingly, post-shot the puck is fairly soupy, which I never got with the normcore basket. My theory is with bigger and more holes in this one, I’m having to grind finer than with the normcore basket since the IMS basket is likely offering even less resistance. With grinding finer when dosing to add some resistance, water seems to be more likely to stand on top of the puck post shot.

If I grind coarser, even a little bit (I’m using a stepless Eureka Mignon Notte) I find that the shot quickly tends toward pulling way, way too fast, and all the flavor problems one typically associates with a shot being pulled too quickly.