Make magazine’s had a lot of interesting articles on coffee related topics. We haven’t undertaken anything radical here, but have come up with a few simple things which have greatly improved the coffee experience with our middle to low end Krups 4050. It performs well IMHO for the price, especially with the following:
- Buy small quantities of Peet’s Coffee: Maybe someday we’ll try roasting/grinding our own, but this seems like a good compromise given the effort.
- Chisel off the plastic latch from the water/splash tray: We actually had to return the machine after nearly a year because we could not remove the tray to empty it. The plastic had slowly warped from heating over time and the little wedge of plastic on its bottom (which ostensibly keeps the tray from sliding out and making a mess) was simply too tight to disengage. The new machine had a tray of different type plastic, but it didn’t seem worth the hassle, so first thing I did was trim off most of the nub of plastic. It no longer gives a positive click when slid into the machine, but wont get stuck again.
- Coffee ground guide: This idea came from Dave Hansen and isn’t machine specific. Find a yoghurt cup with a bottom diameter size near that of the inner diameter of your portafilter. Cut out the bottom and enough of the sides of the yoghurt cup to fit into the portafilter (see picture above…Yoplait cup just visible on bottom right). This makes it really easy to quickly dump in grounds without making a mess, break up any hunks and get just the right amount (ie: slightly more than the height of the portafilter since the grounds will be tamped down quite a bit).
- Swap the Krups pressurized portafilters (double bottomed with only a single outlet hole in the true bottom versus the many holes in the false bottom): We are using pretty fresh coffee always and have gotten a nice crema with the standard Krups portafilters. This is supposedly a fake crema though and eventually we’ve started having a lot of trouble with the portafilters clogging, regardless of the size ground we use. Searching online we found a number of portafilters which would potentially fit our machine. Krups’ own older non-pressurized ones were the first we tried and they work like a charm. The crema is not any more or less in volume, but it’s notably different in consistency and taste. I’m not convinced it is notably better or worse, just different. And it doesn’t clog which is key. The coffee is also coming out as a nice puck after pulling a shot now, where before the output was fairly random between over dry puck, good consistency puck and pure soup. (Pictured above the original pressurized portafilter is on the left and the new to us “older” Krups non-pressurized portafilter is on the right.)