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A not-so-well known, but highly educated coffee roaster in Italy has once advised us to leave the spent grinds in the portafilter until the next extraction. The sole purpose was to stabilize the heat dissipation in the grouphead, especially an E61 grouphead connected to a heat exchanger (not double boiler machine). The reasoning is that the grouphead would overheat less. Although we have not tested this, this is a possibility. The second reason is sweating in the portafilter basket - water vapor would build up in the basket.
There are a few reasons against leaving the spent grounds in the portafilter handle:
a) the espresso puck can stick to the dispersion screen,
b) there would be an increase of rancid coffee oils passing through the dispersion screen, and
c) in a commercial environment, it would increase wait times for cleaning.
What are your thoughts?
2 comments:
Perhaps the best is following the advice of the Italian coffee roaster - leave the spent grinds in the portafilter until next extraction, but (of course, as always) completely clean by using the machine's pressure to clean the dispersion screen before next use - if puck sticks to the dispersion screen, cleaning it that way will unstick the puck, and moreover many of the rancid coffee oils should wash away. (Of course, this is complementary to the real cleaning by back-flushing with blind ultrafilter...)
I think the missing factor is "time until the next extraction". In a commercial environment where the next extraction is seconds or minutes away it makes a lot of sense to leave the spent puck, at home where the next extraction may be hours away I would remove after extraction: just take a good whiff of a several hour old puck...
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