Sage Appliances BES100 Espresso Knock Box, The Knock Box Mini

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If, like me, you consider your coffee drinking as not just a way to get caffeine into your body, but as a hobby, you’ll be well aware that you end up accumulating a lot of different pieces of equipment. Pod coffee machines with special nests to store your pods, filter coffee machines with airtight storage for your grounds, grinders (hand-held or electric), portable coffee makers, espresso machines, milk frothers – not to mention all the different cups and mugs. It goes on and on and on.

But until/unless that happens, if you class yourself as a completely normal coffee drinker, you're just looking for an ultra-convenient cost-effective way to stay caffeinated, then honestly, don't worry about coffee machine accessories. If you're getting into home barista espresso, in my opinion, you absolutely need a coffee grinder – and not just any grinder, but a burr grinder that is capable of grinding for standard basket espresso.

WHAT IS humm?

I know these aren't really “hands off” machines, because the user still has to handle the portafilter, but really I'm referring to the user rather than the machine, if that makes sense? In other words, if you're the kind of espresso machine user who would want as much convenience as possible, but you want true espresso, not bean to cup espresso, then the Oracle touch in particular is aimed at you, and the Oracle too to a large degree, just without the colour touch screen and the personalisation that this brings with it. There are probably only a few coffee machine accessories that are actually essential, and for the rest of them, it just depends on what you're looking for from your espresso machine. My plan with this post is to help everyone to understand which tools you need, and which you can ignore, for you personally, because there really is no one size fits all approach for home espresso. Coffee Machine Accessories – The Horses for Courses Approach I do it, because I quite like doing it, I find it quite therapeutic, and if I've had to go particularly fine with the beans I'm using I think it probably has more of a benefit, as there tends to be more clumps to break up when you grind finer. I installed the one from Shades of Coffee, it was really easy to do, and I'm absolutely useless at DIY, so if I did it, you can probably do it. I wasn't even sure which end of the screwdriver was which. PID (For the Rancilio Silvia and Gaggia Classic)

Whether you need to upgrade your basket depends on your machine, mainly. If you have a machine with a portafilter size that competition baskets are available for, which is most 51, 53, 54, and 58mm group machines, then it's an option you could look into. Some would say that if you're going to fit a pid you may as well buy an espresso machine that doesn't need modding to include a PID, and while that does make sense for the Rancilio Silvia given that you're actually quite close to the price of the Profitec Go or ECM Casa V by the time you've pidded it, it's not quite true of the Classic. More often than not, when you use bottomless portafilters, you get one of the most common signs of channeling, spurters, where espresso decides it wants to go on your worktop, your pants, or straight in your eyeball if you're crouching down looking up at it (that has happened to me on numerous occasions).The Weiss Distribution Technique (WDT) reduces the chance of channeling by breaking up coffee clumps and evenly distributing the coffee in the basket. It's particularly useful if your grinder produces clumps, which most of the more entry-level grinders will do especially when having to grind particularly fine. I've done bottomless portafilter shots, too, trying to see the difference that WDT makes to the shot as it's often easier to see the more subtle channeling (very small spurters) in the shot than it is to taste the difference and to be honest the tests are inconclusive, but as I say, I suspect it does slightly improve consistency, and I certainly have never seen any evidence of WDT having a negative impact. Leveller Obviously, someone can move from one category to the other. I certainly did, I was a very normal coffee drinker up until about 2014/2015 when I started to dip my toes in the proverbial rabbit hole, which is what prompted me to start this blog, almost straight away, just as a hobby for the first few years.