Time for your Quarterly Espresso Machine Group Maintenance

Recently, we looked through our vault of coffee knowledge and were inspired to re-visit a topic that we will be highlighting every quarter from here on out. We advocate for these simple tasks because of their direct relationship to coffee quality.

We also advocate a pro-active fixed cost maintenance schedule, as opposed to a re-active emergency increased cost maintenance schedule.

EP took a survey that asked a simple question to address the topic at hand.

Do you change your group gasket and portafilter basket at the same time? How Often?

The numbers that came in, were a little concerning. To help drive home the importance of maintenance schedules, the results are shared below:

Quarterly Group Maintenance

It should be common knowledge that minor espresso machine group maintenance should be done quarterly or at the very least twice a year. We try our best to preach it here at Espresso Parts. What this means is that group gaskets, group screens, and portafilter baskets should all be changed simultaneously in conjunction with a very thorough group head cleaning.

Why so often?

Let’s start with taste: Build up of coffee oils around the gasket can adversely affect your espresso’s flavor. Preventive maintenance: Over time your gaskets can become “baked” in place making them difficult to replace at best. Changing the gasket, screen, and basket together: Over time the mating surface and bottom of the portafilter basket will inevitably wear. By the time symptoms like leaking portafilters become noticeable you have may have a bigger problem on your hands. Basket replacement suddenly becomes critical and expedited shipping charges may have to be paid to get the new portafilter baskets quickly. Your new $7-12 portafilter basket just cost you $40 or so. Don’t let it happen to you.

We have Basic Espresso Machine Group Maintenance tutorials and a host of others in our Espresso/Coffee Tutorial section.

Below you’ll find group gaskets, portafilter baskets, group screens, and even some kits that contain all you need to perform your next group maintenance.