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I have a relatively cheap (<£100) espresso machine. Sometimes I find that after making a drink, I remove the handle and find the filter basket has lots of water in, so rather than tapping out a dry, compacted lump of coffee grounds into the bin, I have to wash a sloppy mess down the sink.
Sometimes I get it right, but I haven't worked out what I'm doing inconsistently to make this happen.
I have seen this happen due to the age of the coffee being used. I believe that fresh coffee, something roasted within a week of use may cause the soupy puck you are experiencing. The rule of thumb is if the coffee tastes good, don't work about the puck.
A few possibilities spring to mind:
If the puck is a bit wet that's not necessarily a problem as long as your extraction is fine. As I understand you are still able to pull the shot, so clogging as suggested is probably not the reason.
The reasons for pucks to be wet is most often that the space between the puck and the group head is too big. When you start pulling the shot, the water is pumped through the group head onto your grounds, filling up the space between the head (more precisely the metal filter) and the puck. The pressure then pushes the water through the grounds, extracting the coffee. When you finish the extraction process there's obviously still water in this chamber and if it's too much it will wet the puck into the sloppy mess you are referring to.
It could be that the basket you are using is too big for the shots you pull or rather that you use too little ground coffee. If it's a single basket you should use about 9-10g of coffee for an espresso with a yield of about 18-20g. However as I said, it's not really a problem if the extraction is ok and the espresso tastes good.
