Pressurized vs non pressurized filter baskets I own a DeLonghi Dedica coffee machine for a year now and recently invested in a good burr grinder (Sage Dose Control Pro). I like drinking long coffees with milk and I’m satisfied with the coffee the DeLonghi machine produces.
The machine comes with pressurized filter baskets, and after doing some research online I found that non pressurized filter baskets can actually create even better coffee. So I decided to buy a naked portafilter with a non pressurized filter basket on Aliexpress.
However, I am still struggling to get something good out of the non pressurized one. Often it is so strong and bitter that I can’t even finish it and I can’t wrap my head around why this is happening.
How is it possible, given a same dose of ground coffee and the same grind setting, that with a pressurized filter basket I can create a coffee that’s actually pretty nice, and it doesn’t even matter how much water runs through the coffee grounds, if my tamp was level, etc., but with the non pressurized basket I can’t get anything drinkable?
You will need to grind a lot finer with the non-pressurised baskets.
With a pressurised filter basket, the resistance is mostly produced by the one tiny hole in the filter basket. For non-pressurised ones, the coffee needs to provide the resistance.
If the grounds fail to provide enough resistance, the water will run through the coffee really fast, probably creating a bunch of channels which you can usually see as little holes in the coffee bed after the extraction. The problem with the channels is that most of the water goes through the channels (over extracting the coffee there) instead of evenly extracting all available grounds.