Last month I finally put in an order for the Rattleware handle-less pitcher (among some other little tools). I’d been admiring this thing since its appearance in Barista Mag a good while back. It’s a beautiful thing; the insulating sleeve was a lot more substantial than I’d pictured, and the whole pitcher has a nice heft to it.

After using nothing but straight walled pitchers for years, I knew I’d have to make a few tiny adjustments in technique to compensate for the bell shape. What I didn’t consider was the lame extended pouring spout. My first pours with this thing were just disastrous! Every time I tipped it, milk would gush out from the spaces created between the spout and side walls. I could fix that by pouring super slowly, but both the poured milk consistency and art suffered. Comparing the design to my standard pitchers, it seemed I could simply  hack the little extra bit of metal off the end to mod the handle-less back into a usable tool.

I tried this last night with a cheapo hacksaw and a rock: simple enough, although it would have been really nice to have had a real metal file lying around to polish the cut up better. I tried running it through some paces last night on my home bar. Huge improvement! May not end up giving me any additional control compared to the handled varieties, but at least now it will pour defined lines at a usable speed without making an enormous mess. I start a bar shift in about 2 minutes, so I’ll get to really test it out! If it’s promising, I’ll hunt down a file and finish polishing the cut.

Left pics full sized for some nice metal shard detail!