burrsim
Theorycrafting for espresso gear: item level, stat weights and best-in-slot, applied to grinders, baskets and portafilters instead of raid loot.
Espresso gear advice is almost entirely prose. Ask whether to upgrade the grinder or the machine and you get the same rule of thumb — put most of the budget into the grinder — restated across a dozen articles. Ask whether a specific aftermarket basket seats in a specific portafilter and you get a forum thread where somebody worked it out by buying both.
The second kind of question is the interesting one. It has a single correct answer, that answer is a measurement, and nobody has written it down in a table. burrsim is that table.
1. The compatibility matrix
The primary asset: 40–60 gear pairs whose compatibility is a millimetre-level fact rather than an opinion. Every row will cite the manufacturer specification it came from, so a claim here can be checked against its source rather than taken on trust.
| Dimension | Why it decides a purchase |
|---|---|
| Basket × portafilter seating | The 58 / 58.5 / 54 mm families are not interchangeable, and the half-millimetre matters. |
| Puck screen diameter and thickness | Thickness changes headspace, so a screen that fits can still stop the shower screen seating. |
| Tamper and dosing funnel sizing | Sized to the basket, not the machine — the common mismatch. |
| Aftermarket basket fitment | Whether a given third-party basket seats in a given machine's portafilter. |
| Kitchen clearance | Counter footprint, under-cabinet height, and lid-open clearance, which is the number that actually governs whether a grinder fits. |
That last row is the shape of the whole project: a grinder's closed height is on every product page, and the height with the hopper lid open — the one that determines whether it goes under your cabinets — is on none of them.
2. Spec comparison tables
Burr size and geometry, conical against flat, RPM, retention, stepped against stepless. Factual, tabulated, and sourced the same way as the matrix.
3. Upgrade Finder
Describe a setup, get upgrades ranked by marginal gain per pound. This is the part people will actually want to use, and it will be rendered to static pages like everything else — the tables are the product, and an interactive layer only ever sits on top of them.
4. Scoring and tier lists
Item level, stat weights and best-in-slot per budget bracket, over candidate axes: grind uniformity, temperature stability, flow control, retention and workflow speed. This falls out of the data from the first two sections rather than needing any of its own.
Why it is shaped like a game
The vocabulary is borrowed from World of Warcraft, where theorycrafting turned gear choice from argument into arithmetic. Espresso has the same structure — discrete slots, measurable stats, a budget — and none of the tooling. The borrowing is how the data is presented, not a second subject: there is no coffee-and-gaming crossover here, just the one good idea from the other hobby.
Glossary
- Theorycrafting
- Working out optimal equipment by modelling its measured effects, rather than by reputation. From World of Warcraft, via tools like SimulationCraft and Raidbots.
- Best-in-slot (BiS)
- The strongest item available for one equipment slot, usually qualified by a constraint — here, a budget bracket.
- Item level (ilvl)
- A single number summarising an item's overall strength, used for rough comparison across very different items.
- Stat weight
- How much one unit of a given stat is worth relative to the others, which is what makes two unlike items comparable at all.
- Retention
- Ground coffee left inside a grinder after a dose, which stales and contaminates the next one.