Why you'll love it: The Decent Tamper's calibrated pressure and precision manufacturing ensure you get the same tamp on your coffee every time and the big, round, burnished handle feels and looks great.
Making espresso can be frustrating. Even when you spend a lot of time and money, you can end up with a frustratingly inconsistent coffee quality. One major variable that impacts the quality of espresso extraction is the compression or tamping of the grounds in the portafilter.
The two major tamping errors that lead to bad coffee are uneven tamping and a ring of untamped coffee due to imprecise manufacturing. For professional baristas, tamping can also lead to injury, either from overuse of the wrist or from slipping. Decent Espresso took its science-based approach to espresso making and got to work on solving these problems. The result was the Decent Tamper, which one expert described as a "game changer" for baristas.
The genius of the Decent Tamper is in its carefully calibrated spring. This ensures exactly the same tamping force of 25 pounds is used every time. Tamping inconsistently makes it hard to ensure a consistent high quality cup.
Decent Espresso worked with two dozen baristas including Scott Rao, a globally recognized coffee expert, to design a tamp that would work equally well for shop baristas who pull hundreds of shots and home baristas making their morning macchiato. Reviewers found the tamper "effortless to use" and "extremely well made"
Another potential pitfall when tamping coffee is an uneven tamp, which compresses one area of the puck more than another. This will lead to water flowing through the least-tamped area in the coffee puck and a poor-quality espresso. The Decent Tamper addresses this problem with a precisely machined to fit exactly into a modern 58.7-millimeter portafilter basket without leaving any untamped coffee around the circumference of the puck.
The fit is so tight that Decent Espresso had to machine grooves into the tamper to prevent it sucking the puck out of the portafilter as it is withdrawn. This tight fit also makes it much easier to achieve a level tamp, which ensures even extraction.
In our testing, we found that the Decent Tamper feels great in the hand and delivers consistent and reliable results. With several machines to test, that allowed us to change everything from temperature to pressure to flow rate, it was a relief to have tamping pressure be a consistent variable.
Even when focusing on testing a machine or a grinder, this was the tamper that we reached for again and again, making it our pick for the best espresso tamper.
Pros: Precisely calibrated pressure, precision machined to eliminate the untamped coffee ring, big, rounded burnished handle
Cons: Only one color available, might feel too large or heavy for users with small hands, Not as cheap as some other options
Buy the Decent Espresso Tamper on Amazon for $140