How to choose a coffee tamper?
Your coffee tamper is like a key and your portafilter basket is the lock. A good fit ensures you evenly compress the coffee grounds, preventing weak spots and watery disasters. Here’s the golden rule: your tamper should be slightly smaller than the inside diameter of your filter basket. Beyond consistency, automatic tampers alleviate the physical strain associated with manual tamping. Over time, repetitive manual tamping can lead to wrist and hand fatigue, or even injuries. Automatic tampers take this pressure off, allowing baristas to focus on other aspects of coffee preparation.
What to use instead of tamp?
Much to our surprise, using things like beer bottles, pestle and teaspoons to tamp your grinds can make just as delicious a coffee as using our $200 hand-crafted professional tamper. There are many different sizes of tampers available, such as 51mm, 53mm, 53. Theoretically, the size of the tamper you should buy should be slightly smaller than the inner diameter of the coffee portafilter basket for the tamper to work properly.Our favorite spring-loaded espresso tamper is the extremely consistent and sturdy Normcore V4 Coffee Tamper. We liked the Crema Coffee Products Distributor/Leveler & Hand Tamper as a palm version; it has a built-in leveler and tamps pucks consistently.
What is the best tamper size?
FAQ – Coffee Tampers For a standard 58 mm portafilter basket, the ideal tamper size is 58. That slight increment makes better contact with the basket edges and reduces the likelihood of channeling. FAQ: 58mm vs 54mm Portafilters A: Yes. Larger baskets (58mm) allow for more coffee and can produce a fuller-bodied shot. Smaller baskets (54mm) may taste brighter or lighter.