Home › Home & Kitchen › Kitchen & Dining › Coffee, Tea & Espresso › Espresso Machines How to Clean an Espresso Machine Published: July 9, 2026 · Updated: July 9, 2026
After every shot, purge and wipe the steam wand and knock out the puck; each week, backflush with a blind basket and espresso-machine detergent and soak the portafilter and baskets. Every one to three months descale the boiler with a proper descaler — the wand and backflush clear milk and coffee oils, descaling clears the water's limescale.
Recommended Daily: wipe the wand. Weekly: backflush and soak. Monthly-ish: descale — oils and scale are two separate jobs — An espresso machine gathers two different kinds of gunk that need two different fixes: coffee oils and milk on the parts that touch your drink, and limescale inside from the water, so a routine handles each on its own schedule. Daily, right after steaming, open the steam valve for a second to purge milk out of the wand and wipe it with a damp cloth before it dries on, and rinse the portafilter and basket. Weekly, if your machine is a standard pump type, backflush it: put the blind (holeless) basket in the portafilter with a little espresso-machine detergent like Cafiza and run the pump in short bursts to push water back through the group, then repeat with plain water; soak the portafilter, baskets, and shower screen in the same detergent. Every one to three months, depending on how hard your water is, run a descaling solution (or the maker's descaler) through the boiler and group to dissolve the mineral scale that slows flow and shifts temperature, then flush thoroughly. Wipe the drip tray and hopper, use filtered water to slow scale, and always check your model's manual — some machines must not be backflushed.
