How to clean an espresso shower screen

The shower screen is the last thing water touches before your coffee, and the first place old grounds and oils build up. A quick soak and scrub keeps extraction even and prevents stale flavours from creeping into every shot.

What you need

• Cafiza or similar detergent
• Soft brush
• Screwdriver (machine-dependent)

How to do it

1. Let the machine cool down
2. Remove the shower screen (loose or via the central screw, depending on the machine)
3. Dissolve 6g of Cafiza in 1 liter of hot water
4. Soak the screen for 15–30 minutes
5. Scrub with a soft brush or an old toothbrush
6. Rinse thoroughly under the tap
7. Put the screen back

Tips from the bench

Collected from manufacturer guidance and years of home-barista forum wisdom:

• If the screen will not come out, it is usually the gasket gripping it, not the screen itself. Lever gently at the edge with a flat screwdriver, using the group's lip for counter-leverage, and work around in small steps.
• Genuinely stuck? Sacrifice the gasket, not the screen: pick the old gasket out in pieces. A gasket that grips that hard was due for replacement anyway.
• Hold the screen up against the light after soaking. Every hole should be a clean pinprick of light; scrub again where it is not.
• Take a photo before disassembly. Screens and dispersion plates have an orientation, and future-you will not remember it.

How often?

Recommended cadence by machine type, from the maintenance data behind the Espremo app:

Machines that run their own cleaning cycle (like the Breville Oracle series) handle some of this automatically — cadence also shifts with water hardness and daily shot volume.

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