Canal Seattle | The Hummingbird Portafilter
An exciting new portafilter, designed to make life easier for the professional barista: light weight, super strong, easier to tighten, and configurable for a customized fit. Available in a wide range of color variants, bringing a stylish flair to your machine. You literally have to feel it to believe it!
The portafilter is the part of the espresso machine that baristas interact with the most, so intuition suggests that it would always receive careful design scrutiny to ensure that it feels right and functions properly for the user. Considerations such as balancing heft and durability with nimbleness and ease of use, as well as proper fitment in different machines come to mind.
Somehow, that’s not been the case - portafilters have remained largely unchanged from their original bulky and heavy characteristics, and to this day they’re primarily made of cast stainless steel and rival a framing hammer in overall weight.
In a high-paced café setting, the repeated use of such a heavy tool subjects baristas to unnecessary arm and wrist strain that can have legitimate career-threatening potential if it goes on long enough.
Put simply, we think that HAS gone on long enough - for the industry as a whole - and it's time to set a new standard and redefine the way professionals make coffee.
Canal Seattle is proud to introduce our Hummingbird Portafilter: designed specifically for baristas and built to reduce strain on the body through new, lightweight materials and modernized manufacturing processes. It’s a fresh new take on the iconic espresso tool that is lighter in weight while maintaining durability and strength, is easier to tighten via low-friction and interchangeable ear inserts, and brings eye-catching flair to any machine with an array of exciting color variants.
We replaced the stainless steel body with an incredibly strong and lightweight fiberglass-reinforced molded polymer, commonly used to make power tools.
The ring that locks into the group is machined alloy, providing high heat conductivity while remaining lightweight.
The ears are lined with interchangeable pads made of a high-temp thermoplastic called PEEK, drastically reducing the tightening force. Each portafilter ships with a range of insert sizes, allowing the user to adjust for optimized fitment in their machine.
These innovations combine to create a totally new experience of using a portafilter. You literally have to feel it to believe it, and you won’t want to go back!
