Tea Portafilter Version 2
The Taiwanese invented the tea portafilter to make bubble tea concentrate on espresso machines. They're widely available on Amazon and elsewhere, and we've long resold a modified version of one from Taiwan. We now make our own tea portafilter, from scratch.
Why?
The existing tea portafilters you can cheaply buy have so many problems. We've tried many suppliers, and found:
- the metal washers used will quickly rust. You likely won't notice, as rust is the same color as tea.
- the top of the portafilters is always flat and thin, and has trouble making a pressure tight seal against the group head gasket
- the sealing ball is made of varying materials, depending on the supplier. Our previous supplier was using a material that sealed well, and then, inexplicably, changed their material, so that it wore out quickly, and could no longer hold pressure during the tea steeping phase.
- the pressure creating springs are of poor quality, and vary massively (2 to 6 bar) in the pressure needed to open the sealing bar.
- the handle is welded on, instead of being part of the casting, and tended to crack off, as well as being at a steep angle.
- the locking wings tended to be sharp and scratch the inside paint of the group head.
- the handle angle was not steep enough, and scratched the inside of the group head mount. We had to hand-polish off part of the handle on the portafilters we bought from other sources, to solve this interference.
While we were able to fix some problems with parts swap (rusty washers, for instance) we weren't able to fix the gasket sealing and sealing ball material issues.
So, we decided to make our own design from scratch, pay for a stainless steel mould, and control the entire product. It's been almost a year of work for my engineer Johnny, and an expensive endeavor (stainless casting moulds are costly), but we weren't able to get to the quality we wanted, so we had to solve it ourselves.
This also means that we have stock of all the component parts. We can sell replacement parts, as well as incrementally improve the performance of each. If anything turns out to be sub-par, we can improve that part and send it to you, along with assembly instructions. https://decentespresso.com/portafilter
Updated 2024/10/04