Weber Workshops Accessories Overview

About a month ago, our friends at Weber Workshops generously sent us an entire suite of their most popular espresso accessories and grinders to test and experiment with at our lab at Clive HQ. We started with an overview of the Weber Key grinder. It blew us away with its build quality, quality-of-life improvements, and performance versatility for different roasts and bean varietals. We decided within moments, but after pulling hundreds of shots and days of caffeine overload, we had to start carrying the Key grinder for you. 

Let’s explore Weber's accessories, which we’re equally stoked about sharing with you and delighted to add to our lineup. It appears that Clive and Weber Workshops are simpatico in vision and ethos, and our modus operandi is to offer only the best products that will help you make tastier espresso. 

Moonraker

Distribution is the linchpin of making great espresso and should be part and parcel of any passionate home barista’s workflow. The Moonraker has overlapping geared needles, which both properly distribute your coffee bed and de-clumps your dose. Give the Moonraker two to three turns, and your coffee bed is perfectly distributed and homogenized. The premium ULTRA version comes with beautifully reinforced brass gears, whereas the STANDARD edition has a simplified yet just as functional food-safe polymer & anti-static gears. Both versions come with medical-grade needles embedded by magnets for easy removal, all housed in an aerospace-quality aluminum casing. Peer through the reinforced glass top, watch the gears turn, and distribute your coffee bed perfectly each time. 

Blind Shaker

By extension, the Blind Shaker is an excellent addition to your puck prep routine. Shaking your grounds is a relatively new puck prep method, but it has proven to eliminate static electricity from the grinding process and decrease channeling. After giving your grounds a few shakes, place the Shaker on top of your portafilter, remove the plunger, and proceed with the rest of your routine. Anecdotally, espresso enthusiasts have said it leads to higher extraction yields after testing with a refractometer; we suggest you find out by pulling shots and drinking some espresso. 

Buck Portafilter & Unibasket

With several options for bottomless portafilters on the market, what makes the Buck unique? Other than its simplicity and beauty, the Buck sets itself apart with its build quality. Instead of using chrome-plated brass, which often ages poorly and breaks down over time, the Buck is fashioned with a single piece of stainless steel, including the core of the handle. Most importantly, the Buck sits flat on your counter and scale, allowing for easy puck prep and tamping. This seemingly innocuous feature is a massive quality of life improvement, which eliminates having to balance your portafilter on a scale, avoiding unnecessary messes and coffee waste. 

The Buck is optimized to work with the Unibasket; however, it will also work with stock 58mm baskets, VST, IMS, Pullman, etc. At first glance, the Unibasket is just a basket, but it’s unlike any basket we’ve ever used. It’s built out of a single puck of thick stainless steel, and its design provides some key benefits. The basket's straight sidewalls make the basket's bottom as wide as possible, thus maximizing extractible surface area from end to end. There’s also no tapering, which allows water to flow through the basket as evenly as possible across the entire area of the basket. The thickness of the basket adds thermal stability and prevents the basket from flexing as the brew chamber pressurizes, maintaining thre integrity of the puck.

Unifilter

The Unifilter is the singular construction of the Buck and the Unibasket as one seamless portafilter. Since it's constructed from a single block of stainless steel, the Unifilter maintains fantastic heat stability and is exceedingly easy to clean. There are no nooks and crannies to worry about here! The Unifilter is meant to dose 18-22g shots.

Coffee Storage 

Weber’s bean cellar coffee tubes provide an incredible storage space for your coffee beans. Single-dosing perfected. Beyond the beautiful wood and brass construction, the critical difference is the tube caps. Weber’s proprietary one-way valve system allows the CO2 of freshly roasted coffee to off-gas, displacing the lighter oxygen from the valve at the top of the cap. Thus, your beans only touch oxygen twice. Once you dose the beans into the tube and second when ready to grind. While the glass tubes are a countertop statement piece, the polycarbonate tubes are more for hardcore single-doses and tinkerers. The polycarbonate tubes are perfect for freezing your doses, keeping your coffee fresh for much longer. 

Spring Clean

Backflushing and cleaning your espresso machine is a fact of life, but the Spring Clean makes it better and faster. It truly offers a simplified routine, and we love not having to fumble with multiple tools that clutter up the counter—a cleaning process that is less time-consuming and more thorough. 

Everyone at Clive is thrilled to bring Weber's products into your lineup, and we're so excited to share them with you. Making espresso at home, first and foremost, should be fun, and Weber reignites the inner coffee nerd in all of us. Cheers.  

Shop the Weber Workshops Collection Here