Tamping: How important is it for increasing consistency?
There’s various ways a Barista can tamp their coffee and each Barista has their own unique style. So how important is Tamping to ensure consistency when extracting coffee?
Over the past few years as a Barista I’ve seen many methods with tamping introduced to help Barista’s give their customers consistent and the best possible flavours that can be extracted out of their coffee. As we want to ensure our customers get the best coffee we need to refocus on pulling our coffee shot as this is one of the main parts in our coffee; essentially the coffee shot is always the part that determines a good coffee from a bad coffee. Besides grinding and weighing your coffee we need to make sure that we are correctly tamping our coffee from the correct distribution and tamp pressure and ensuring it is level.
A style that I have used for the past few years is through using the Pullman Chisel, Pullman Big Step Tamper and the Pullman Tamping Station as these three-combined give me a consist set up to extract my coffee shot. As to why I use these three tools I will elaborate for you.
The Pullman Chisel: After grinding my coffee I need a way to ensure that I am tamping all the coffee that has been ground. The reason for this is I when I tamp I want to make sure there is no air pockets that will mean not all the coffee in the basket is being extracted, ultimately losing some of our flavours. The Pullman Chisel is a tool that distributes our coffee when we use it, shaped like a chisel it helps give the coffee in the basket a nice even distribution that sets us up for a nice even tamp.
The Pullman Big Step: The Big Step Coffee tamper is designed to ensure that all coffee in your basket is tamped. How you might ask? Its design allows it to fit perfectly in all VST Standard baskets and all 58mm coffee baskets without leaving any coffee particles on the side so that all coffee can be extracted ensuring we get the most out of our coffee and the whole puck is extracted. Seeing as our coffee has been nicely distributed we are able to make sure that our tamp will be nice and even.
The Pullman Tamping Station: The Tamping Station is another tool designed to assist us with tamping, it has a holder for your tamper to keep its surface from being scratched. It has a brush designed to clean your tamper after use. When it comes to tamping this station has a rubber mate designed to hold your porta-filter so you can tamp your coffee using the Chisel and Big Step on a nice level and flat surface which is what gives us that level coffee tamp.
With these 3 tools, we can ensure that when it comes time to extract our coffee shot we are going to get the best out of our coffee for our customers. When we also look at tamping the pressure that is applied makes a difference to how your shot comes out; however, it is said that it needs to be 30 pound of pressure, this as a standard is not viable as each person applies 30 pounds of pressure differently, setting up your grinder for your maximum pressure tamp is more than enough for tamp pressure.
If you’re looking to make a difference to how you tamp your coffee then the tools mentioned in this article are a good way to start, however we all have personal preference on the products we use in our café, we feel that the Australian made Pullman products are consistent and a benefit to when we extract our coffee. As they do say the better the quality of the tools you use the better end result of the finished product.
