Marta

On returning the bags: worth mentioning to the shop rather than assuming they will not care.

A good retailer wants to know that stock is sitting too long, because it means their ordering is wrong for that line. I have had a shop rotate their coffee shelf and start ordering smaller quantities after exactly that conversation.

Bring both bags and the codes. It is much more persuasive than a description of a taste.

For the practical question you are really asking — how much am I having — the useful move is to track what you can control and treat café drinks as a wide range.

At home, weighing your dose gives you a consistent baseline. Out, assume a wide interval, because the same drink name varies enormously between shops in both dose and shot count.

And if the reason for asking is that caffeine is affecting you, that is a conversation worth having with a doctor rather than solving with an instrument — individual sensitivity varies far more than the drinks do.

There is no need to replace it on a schedule. It is a piece of metal, and metal with clean unblocked holes is doing its job.

The pack composition is about the gasket, not the filter. Gaskets are the wear item — they are rubber or silicone, they get compressed and heated twice a day, and they harden, shrink and stop sealing within roughly a year of regular use. A pot that hisses at the seam or takes ages to build pressure usually needs a gasket.

Selling a filter plate with every third gasket is a sensible retail decision rather than an engineering requirement: it covers the people whose plate genuinely has deteriorated, and it costs pennies to include.

Replace it when it stops working, and the failure modes are visible.

The warm-water start in a stovetop pot deserves emphasis because it changes the drink more than any other single adjustment.

Filling the base with already-hot water means the pot reaches brewing pressure quickly, so the grounds spend far less time sitting in a heating chamber slowly cooking. Cold start, and the coffee bed is baked for several minutes before anything flows.

Use a cloth to handle it, since the base gets hot fast, and take it off the heat the moment the flow turns pale and starts to sputter. Run it under a cold tap for a second to stop the extraction dead.

Between that and a coarser grind, a dark roast in a stovetop pot goes from harsh to acceptable in one attempt.

Once it is apart, what actually works:

• Rinse from the reverse side. Particles went in one way; push them back out the way they came rather than trying to force them through.
• A soft toothbrush on the mesh, wet, with the disc held against a flat surface.
• A short soak in a proper coffee equipment cleaner first, to release the oils gluing the particles in place. That is where those products genuinely help — not dissolving the grounds, but letting go of them.
• An ultrasonic cleaner if you happen to have one for jewellery or parts. This does work well and is wildly disproportionate for the problem.

Avoid anything abrasive on the mesh. It is fine wire and once it is distorted the filter lets grounds through forever.