what's up everyone Lance Hedrick here and today we're talking all about tampers yes today's video is all about tampers it's something I've been wanting to do for a while because there is now a plethora of different options on the market and I don't even have nearly enough to be representative of what's on the market today but what I did do is I ensured that I collected a couple of tampers that I thought were representative of other tampers we had some really cheap little plastic tampers that are obviously not great they're not very fun to use
they have you know a bottom that is not very consistently level there's a line in the middle and it it doesn't feel good it's not fun to push down hard to create enough pressure with it we get rid of [Music] that we have kind of the the tamper that's been around for ages which is a stainless steel bottom a wooden handle you know you see the B when you're using a tamper like this you are apt to go in any Rand Direction possible especially if you're doing the whole Tippy Toe thing do not get up
on your tiptoes and try to go crazy hard cuz you're going to introduce a lot of different potential angles on the Tamp and of course we need a super level Tamp for as even of an extraction as possible I've been tamping manually for a decade so numbers for me are not going to be representative of you know the typical home Barista so I just I did not take numbers using this either then we get to the decent tamper now this is the first self-leveling tamper I ever got this is the version three of it whenever
you put this in this Rim sits on the basket so that when you push down it pushes through that and forces you to be as level as possible as you're making your T so I did include this inside of the testing we also have the happy tamper now this is roughly the same thing you have a self-leveling tamper but it's a palm tamper so a lot of people people just prefer doing a little push like that it allows you to use some of the bigger muscles up here where you're just kind of pushing down and
it doesn't matter which angle you're pushing because again it's self-leveling so you can switch out the base for kind of a convex one and then also it comes with an extra flat base next up we have the force tamper which kind of took the World by storm especially in the bista competitions that's because this one was also a self-leveling but it was piston enacted so on the inside there's a little piston in a spring and whenever you come down there's a little mamed Ali inside like that woo and this comes with a few different bases
as well flat rippled base you get just a flat base you get the Topsy Turvy curvy base and then you get a Topsy Turvy curvy Ripple base these are the official names that I just made up and then finally we have the Bose tamper now I did not include this in testing though it is my favorite tamper because it's automatic you place it onto the Porta filter you just twist it it goes down and back up nice I love this one but because it's just another flat tamper and you can calibrate it to whatever weight
you're wanting I did not end up testing [Music] this am so in the end what I tested was the decent tamper cuz it was just a flat bottom and I tested the force tamper with all four bases now I did not end up testing the happy tamper uh I did start testing it but it has such a tight tolerance with the head that if there were any grounds on the side of the walls at all and I would Tamp it would get stuck and then it would unseat my Puck and it made a mess and
it just was a little frustrating when I was doing lots of shots in a roow CU obviously I pulled a lot of shots to test these what I did is I dialed in a coffee 18 G in 40 G out in 30 seconds now I have down in the caption below some uh data from Michael Cooper quantitative Cafe that I think is really interesting he talks about compression of the Pug anyway I found out without a doubt that double tamping my coffees gives me a bit more consistency so that's what I did with all these
tampers so I started by dialing in with the decent tamper and then I would pull shots one by one by one by one by one and then I'd go back in order to give kind of a confusion so that I can reduce as much noise as possible I would go through and pulled shots and recorded the TDS I you know calculated extraction yield etc etc etc with the curved bases there was a significant drop in extraction yield about 2 to 2 and 1 12% drop with a 99% statistical significance granted the consistency was not terrible
especially on just the curved base but the extraction did dip I had Dr Jonathan G help me out crunching the numbers as he always does very helpful now whenever we look at the flat bases it looks like the most consistent and the highest was the decent tamper now the reason I think there was a big difference between the decent tamper and then say the force tamper is the decent just uses a spring and it uses your Force alone whereas a force tamper uses a piston this piston inside at stock calibration is potentially unseating the puck
or disturbing the puck in some way causing it to be a more fluctuating extraction yield now that being said I didn't try too many other settings I use it at stock calibration which is 10 kg of force I did go down to 7 and 1 12 kg of force and was getting similar results that doesn't mean that I couldn't go lower and it would be different but my fear lower than that is it won't compress the puck enough which I will show in a future video the issues if you don't have enough compression but that
would be too many shots to pull all in one experiment while keeping a high quality of data by using the same batch of coffee same day doing all in the same sittings so you might be wondering why I even thought the rippled base would be a good idea well the reason is because when the water enters the bed it's flat right and you have it polished off so it's difficult for the water to really have a place to enter so you want a place for it to kind of be able to dive in and so
the ripples in my mind theoretically create kind of those areas where the water can dive in potentially giving you a bit more consistent [Music] extraction people complain about doughnut shot which is when an extraction happens around the edge before it covers the whole bottom of your naked basket people say that's overe extra in the edges so what they've done is they've created a convex tamper that will Tamp the middle lower and the outsides higher and what this allows is for water to kind of come to the middle a bit more sooner so it's more level
on the bottom and because Optics are everything people think that when they see what looks to be an even extraction it therefore must be an even extraction but what we have learned from our friend Stefan ribe from uh Belgium in the decent espresso group referencing his cookie cutter experiment whenever you have doughnut shots the edge are still actually undere extracted he would cut the puck using a cookie cutter and would measure the remaining solubles in every layer and it turns out that the least extracted part of the puck was actually the edges even in dut
[Music] shots I always see people online saying the number one early upgrade you should make is a naked basket cuz you can eliminate channeling no that's absolutely not true if anything you're going to confuse yourself on what is and what isn't channeling other than maybe spurts which definitely could be channeling it could also be the product of a ground stuck in one of the holes and so it's blocking part of the aperture And So It causes a high pressure small area for the espresso to exit looking like a channel but anyway I'm digressing let's continue
back to where we at so this convex tamper has kind of you know made waves in certain areas and some people swear by it but in reality it greatly greatly reduced our extraction yield which means it's it's decreasing the extraction efficiency there's no way around it if we are doing the same grind size the same pressure of tamping and we're getting good consistency it is literally just extracting lower which means it has worsened the efficiency of the extraction properties when we're trying to chase consistency it seems from the data that a flat based tamper is
the best way to go possibly the Ripple is fine if it's flat but in reality when you look at the data there could be some there could be some fluctuations there but it's not as significant as some of the other conclusions we have drawn in this video today I do still love the force tamper I do think with the flat bottom on it and if as and if you lower the calibration a bit that it is the consistency is good enough to make sure that you're not going to have any types of wild shots now
if the Bose tamper were infinitely charged this is what I would use every single day but the reality is it dies really quickly and I forget to charge it all the time so I end up using the decent tamper for most all of my espressos it's always what I've been gravitated towards and it it it kind of furthers that proof now the purpose of this data is to show that just the conventional flat bottom tamper when you double Tamp it is going to give you kind of the optimal consistency from shot to shot at least
with the tampers currently on the market so if you want to go ahead and get that Norm core spring tamper you've been seeing or you want the little one with the thumb press on it whatever it is even if you want to do manually then you just have the inconsistency of human error but I would highly recommend doesn't matter what price doesn't matter what brand as long as it is a good self-level tamper with a flat base that fits your basket pretty well it doesn't need to be crazy tight but fits the basket pretty well
that is going to give you your most consistent results I hope you appreciated the data collection of this video the nerdiness of it I hope that the conclusion was easy enough to follow along with please consider hitting the like And subscribe if you enjoy the amount of work I put into this if you want to you know catch my new stuff as it comes out I have a patreon below that you should check out where I give away a lot of stuff through competitions we have like 40 machines that we're currently putting up for competition
for the next year or so and um also check out my second YouTube account where I just essentially do a lot of coffee rants it's a lot of fun other than that I hope that you brew something tasty today and cheers
