Coffee Data Science
Can You Espresso using a Kitchen Baster?
Weird experiments out of boredom
This past thanksgiving, while basting the turkey, I thought “Maybe?!?” I thought that it would be funny to try to make coffee with a baster. You have pressure in the tube, and maybe something could be learned. Or maybe fun could be had.
The lesson learned is “NO.” However, I present my failed attempt just in case you ever looked at a baster and also said maybe.
It was pretty straight forward, but I had to put a stopper at the bottom so the coffee wouldn’t come out. I used a small paper filter.
Then I ground my coffee as usual on setting 7 on the Niche. I used about 10g, which was destined to fail.
I set it up to going into a Kruve EQ cup because when using a makeshift espresso machine, you need the cups.
The result was surprising:
Just Joking!
It was a disaster. The water took a long time to penetrate, and the bottom part of the baster caused a choke point.
So let’s try again:
I used 7g instead of 10, and I went to setting 15 on the Niche. This did slightly better, but not much.
So then I switched to setting 25, which is very coarse, for 1g on the bottom, then setting 15 for 3g on top.
The coffee got through basically, but it was still a failure. A baster can’t get too high on the pressure. Of course, the water was hot, but I didn’t measure it to be certain.
The coffee was very oily, and by the end, it had a lot of ground in it.
I didn’t taste this shot or even measure the TDS. It was certain to be terrible. As with science, when a hypothesis fails, you still are left with knowledge from the experiment even if that knowledge is something nobody asked for.
If you like, follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram where I post videos of espresso shots on different machines and espresso related stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can also follow me on Medium and Subscribe.
