How To Use A Coffee Tamper

We're going to look at how to tamp coffee. Tamping basically means making sure that your coffee is compacted into your porter filter and is ready for having the water extracted through. So, the first thing to do is put the right amount of coffee in to our porter filter, I'm using a double spout, that's a porter filter for double espresso so I need about fourteen grams of coffee, that changes with the type of been that you are using so it's always worth checking that.

So, we put our porter filter on the top, so we're going to rest this just for show just on to the top of our coffee like that and you see that it fits perfectly inside there and there is no coffee on the outsides edge. Make sure that the center of the palm of your hand goes on top and then lengthen out and stretch your arm, so actually the force is going up your arm and out the elbow at the top and that actually makes it a lot easier when you're tamping. So we do this and we push down on to the coffee really until it fights back, so it's quite a little bit of force on there.

You want to make sure that you're not pushing too hard but enough that you are forcing that coffee down in the inside. So when you've done that with your nice straight arm, you need to give your tamper about a quarter turn twist that helps seal the coffee across the top. Take the tamper of and you'll be able to see across the top there that we have now taken it to a very smooth, nice, levelled, compact coffee in the inside there.

And that is how to tamp coffee. .