Why a VST Portafilter Basket is better than a Standard Basket
In this video Luke is explaining the benefits of using a VST (Voice Systems Technology) coffee basket verses your regular basket. First thing you'll note about the VST is that they are far more expensive than the regular and with good reason.
The VST addresses the lack of quality and consistency in the filter-basket manufacturing process and they are designed as a filter basket with precise dimensions, standardised filter holes and a target dose mass for each basket. You can actually feel and see the difference in build quality with a quick side by side comparison. The VST feels a little heavier and more uniform in it's appearance than the cheaper counterpart.
The most notable difference you'll see Luke demonstrate in our video is in the extraction and how greatly it improves it.
Video Transcript
0:00
Today I'm going to talk about VST coffee baskets and why would you buy one?
0:05
What's so good about them?
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And will it improve your espresso?
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Compared to a standard basket that you would have in your home machine
0:12
or a commercial machine?
0:18
So about ten years ago, we started to hear things about coffee
0:22
baskets that we'd never really looked into in the past.
0:25
We started to think about the shape, the curves, the number of holes,
0:29
how deep they were, and a whole other range of like precise
0:34
things that need to be considered when we want to create a better espresso.
0:38
Well, from that time frame, basically VST's and a few of the brands out
0:43
there have started making high precision coffee baskets.
0:47
We use.
0:47
We're talking about the VST here because we do like these ones and recommend them.
0:51
But like, why would you look at buying one of these where they're
0:54
typically three times the price of a standard basket?
0:57
Well, let's start diving into what the VST technology is all about.
1:02
So you can buy a VST basket in a whole range of gram sizes, ranging from 25,
1:07
22, 20, 18, 15 and seven grams, and they can be ridged or ridgless.
1:14
Now, just to explain what that ridge or ridgless actually is,
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if you look at this VST basket here, it is ridgless.
1:21
There is no extra little ridge
1:23
that holds it into your group handle with the wire basket.
1:30
So it'll pop in and out a lot easier
1:33
where a rigid basket like this one
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basically allows the group wire to hold that basket
1:41
in a lot firmer
1:44
and a
1:47
little bit harder to push in, harder to get out.
1:50
But that is the only difference between a rigid and a ridgless.
1:53
Now, the effect that that may have after you've extracted coffee
1:56
is when you're trying to knock it out, you might get a little bit of extra grind
1:59
in this little area and also the size of the actual tamper that you're using.
2:04
So you might need to have a little bit more space in a millimeter size
2:08
for a ridged basket over a ridgeless so you can go a little bit larger.
2:13
This is a 58 ml range of baskets, but you could go
2:17
maybe a 58.4 or 58.6 and it would be a lot firmer and tighter.
2:21
So we don't have to worry about it binding over the ridge in this basket here.
2:25
So that's pretty much a personal choice really,
2:27
which way you end up with those ones.
2:29
So in this cheaper basket, we can start to see with a bit of use,
2:33
it has actually started to dome and press down into your actual group handle.
2:39
And that's happening because people are not weighing their coffee grind.
2:43
They're just dosing straight into the handle, probably over packing the basket.
2:47
And when you put water onto it, it's going to expand that coffee
2:50
and create a lot of extra pressure and something has to give.
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Now, there is solenoids to take the water pressure out.
2:57
But while that's happening,
2:59
if the water can't come through because you've got a fine grind.
3:02
It's going to crease that basket and make it bend.
3:05
Now, what's
3:05
actually happening on the side over here, you can start to see a crease.
3:08
And that will at some point open up and become a crack.
3:12
And if that does happen to you, what will happen is your in your coffee
3:15
shots, it'll look like a beautiful shot to start for the first, say, 10 seconds.
3:20
And then instantly it'll just gush out, like terribly
3:23
and you'll think it'll be the worst extraction.
3:25
You don't know really what's going on.
3:27
So if that happens to you, check your basket, look for a crack.
3:30
And I reckon that's going to identify that issue for you.
3:33
So ultimately, we want to stop that from happening
3:36
because we're going to get some more life out of our baskets.
3:39
And we want to make sure that that surface stays nice and flat
3:42
so that the water can process nice and evenly through.
3:45
And we're not going to have that if the basket is
3:48
a more durable basket made from a better material.
3:51
So that's what the VST is going to give us.
3:54
So they're the pretty obvious things that you start to think about
3:56
and you go okay quality and design and so on.
4:00
But now I'm going to look at the technology
4:01
that's actually quite impressive when we look at a VST.
4:05
Now, the holes that are placed into these both these baskets,
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we might think that they look the same,
4:12
but there's a lot of technology that has gone into the VST range.
4:16
So essentially a machine basically punches those holes in.
4:20
And what we've finished up with holes is nice and easy.
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If you get your basket and have a look at it under a light like this,
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you'll start to see that some of those holes may
4:30
actually not be punched fully all the way through
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And if you look at them
4:39
in a microscope, they will may not be a perfectly round shape.
4:42
That could be a star shape or an oval shape.
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And basically, that is changing how your coffee
4:49
and water is actually passing through here.
4:51
So it's actually the end flow of our espresso, which is being changed.
4:56
So if we're getting a varying change of flow through individual holes,
5:00
essentially that's a different change in the extraction that we're achieving.
5:04
I thought I had my phone on silent.
5:09
Right.
5:10
So that's pretty easy to understand.
5:12
Good old flow.
5:13
Well, in the VST basket, there is another whole range of thought
5:17
that's gone into it.
5:19
So when we've got our coffee and it's packed into this basket
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and the water is pressurizing that, basically
5:25
there's a different type of pressure that is being applied
5:29
on top of this coffee bed when we have more or less coffee in there.
5:33
So in this basket it's a 22 gram basket.
5:37
We'll put 22 grams of coffee in there.
5:39
But if we had the 18 or the 20 or all the way
5:42
down to the seven grams,
5:45
that density of grind is actually going to affect the pressure
5:49
and the flow that we can get out of that coffee.
5:52
So what has made the VST even more precise?
5:57
Is that in the box, whichever size that you get, you get this little chart.
6:03
And this chart tells you about
6:05
how big the hole size is and how consistent it is
6:09
for the specific size of basket and grams of coffee you're going to have.
6:14
And what it's ensuring is that the flow that comes out the bottom is consistent.
6:19
So that's really cool because now we're matching
6:21
different densities of coffee to actually get the same flow.
6:25
So that's taking another whole part of the puzzle away.
6:28
So we could technically go and use a 15 gram basket and do an extraction,
6:32
and we'll get the same flow as we would with 20 or 22 grams of coffee.
6:37
So that's taking science the whole next level.
6:39
And I think that's amazing.
6:40
That's going to really help us get consistency.
6:42
If you've got a single shot or a double shot
6:45
with different sizes, of coffee in different baskets.
6:48
So where do I see this basket fitting?
6:50
Well, if you've got yourself a nice naked handle
6:54
and you're going to start to really focus on your espresso.
6:57
You really want to make sure that the extraction
7:00
that's coming out of here
7:01
and what you can see is going to be the best
7:03
because you'll start to make some decisions
7:05
on the look and the quality of that actual extraction.
7:09
So what I want to do is I want to use a bolder, cheaper, bent basket, and we'll do
7:15
the extraction and then we'll use the vest
7:17
and hopefully we can see a few cool results coming out of that.
7:20
So with everything being consistent, we're going to run these two shots.
7:23
I've just heated them up with water and kept them on top of the machine.
7:25
So we can keep that heat in the basket.
7:28
And the handle's been heated as well.
7:29
So they're nice and dry and ready to go.
7:32
We're still going to use
7:32
our standard recipe, which is going to be 22 and a half grams
7:36
of coffee in there, and we're going to pull a 'normale'.
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So that's going to be our two to one ratio.
7:42
We'll end up with 45 grams of liquid weight in the end.
7:44
Now that has actually just come a tad over on the grind.
7:48
There we go.
7:48
So we're 22.5 grams of coffee.
7:52
We'll pop that into the bent basket first.
7:57
You can see that's quite domed
8:00
and it's ridged.
8:07
Now I'm not going to do any WDT or anything like that.
8:10
We're just going to level it out nicely
8:14
because if we did WDT those clumps would be fixed.
8:17
We're just going to do a good old NCD get that flat.
8:23
To be honest, that NCD needs to be a little bit deeper for this one.
8:28
There we go that's fixed that up a lot.
8:31
Okay so we're tamped.
8:37
No latte
8:41
glasses.
8:51
Sorry, no latte glasses on the machine.
8:54
All right. So.
8:58
I'm going to tare that off.
9:02
Lock it in and start our extraction.
9:04
Now, we do have a pre and fusion here as well.
9:09
There you go.
9:10
You can see that high a little pressure squirt that actually came out the left.
9:13
Oh, it got me in the eye.
9:15
Okay.
9:15
There was a there's a lot of squirting going on here.
9:20
And there you go, you can see another one.
9:24
And even look at the color there.
9:25
You can see the dark, the light.
9:28
And actually, it's a really good demonstration of what
9:31
we don't want to have happen.
9:32
There's inconsistencies all the way through that extraction.
9:36
Now, if we didn't if we couldn't see that because we had a double spout portafilter
9:41
on there, we would just look at espresso and go, oh, that's that's pretty tasty.
9:44
You know, we've got some nice dark colors in there and a bit of that tiger
9:48
striping and motteling and we stop that pretty much exactly where we needed to be.
9:53
I didn't check that weight I was a little bit excited.
9:55
But there you go 44.2 grams.
9:58
So let's go back and do that with the.
10:04
Yep, that's a pretty good extraction
10:05
I'm happy with that.
10:09
We'll pop the VST in.
10:11
Alright that's tared.
10:15
We'll get our 22 and a half grams of coffee.
10:20
Woop, that's gone over.
10:27
There you go 22.5.
10:34
Yep. Great.
10:42
All right so we do have a few little clumps in there again.
10:44
So we're pretty much apples for apples.
10:51
There we go
10:52
NCD, leveled
10:56
okay.
10:57
And we tamped that one nice flat and level.
11:03
Flush our head.
11:07
Try and keep it all the same.
11:18
Okay.
11:18
So it did come out a little bit quick there
11:23
at the moment, we're not seeing any high pressure squirts.
11:26
Ohh, one little one that came out and
11:31
maybe another one, but that's a pretty consistent color.
11:35
It's definitely got that
11:37
typical naked extraction with the the cone of water there coming down
11:47
and we've got 45.8 grams of liquid.
11:50
So we actually got
11:55
we got more through that.
11:56
That actually passed through that coffee bed with more volume.
12:00
And if I actually have a look here, it is actually a little over extracted
12:03
You can see that real distinct white pale area there.
12:06
So that's
12:09
pretty typical of what's going to happen when we start to use a VST basket.
12:12
What's actually happening is the flow of water
12:14
is coming through a lot quicker and it's pretty common for people
12:17
to find that when you jump on and use VST baskets.
12:21
So now we can have consistency in those hole sizes.
12:23
We can go a bit finer on our grind and start to slow that down.
12:28
So don't be frightened when you do use these
12:30
and it starts to speed up your shots and your time of your recipe starts
12:35
to come shorter and shorter.
12:36
Well, you can fix that by going finer on your grind. So
12:40
all in all,
12:41
we'll just pop that back out.
12:45
Have a look.
12:46
There you go.
12:50
I always like to
12:51
look at the bottom of a shot there, because if you've got too much stickiness
12:55
or any issues happening, you can usually see where that's
12:58
been caught up afterwards, but that's actually really quite clean.
13:02
The other one,
13:04
it's still pretty clean as well.
13:07
But it's definitely bent.
13:08
definitely buckled.
13:09
You can see those those issues inside there.
13:14
Now, I'm not saying that in this example that this was perfect
13:18
because I would go back and start to change to a finer grind.
13:21
I think I might have seen maybe too little high pressurised squirts
13:25
coming out of there but they were very brief, very small.
13:29
This one, I think there was three or four that were high
13:31
pressurised, really squirting out and really causing lots of issues.
13:35
So there's channeling happening in there as well.
13:37
So if that gives you an idea of what's happening
13:40
between a bent old basic basket versus a VST
13:44
I hope it's got you an understanding as well of why we'd look at it.
13:47
Now we wanted to look at this further and we go really geeky.
13:50
We can go TDS and actually start to see how much dissolved solids and dialling
13:55
this in perfectly to make sure that we're going to get the best recipe.
13:58
So we'll do that in another video.
14:00
But if you've got any questions, hey, please reach out.
14:02
Happy to help you with those.
14:05
The VST's on our website.
14:06
You can get yourself a nice little handle like that.
14:08
If you're going to invest into a naked and spend this kind of money.
14:12
Well, you want to get a nice basket for it.
14:13
Don't cheap out and get a a really cheap,
14:17
badly pressed holed
14:18
basket because you're only going to negate any sort of development
14:22
of your experience in learning how to extract coffee better.
14:25
Thanks very much for watching, guys. Hope that's helped you.
14:27
We'll catch you next time. Cheers!
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