What is amping and why is it necessary?
Tamping is an important part of making a good espresso or cappuccino. After your filter basket is full of ground coffee, you need to compress the coffee grounds, and this process is called ‘tamping’. By tamping the coffee grounds, you pack it together a lot tighter, meaning it takes longer for the water to flow through the coffee, thereby extracting more flavour from the coffee grounds. If you didn’t tamp the coffee grounds, the water would run through the coffee very quickly, resulting in a weak watery coffee, and a lot of wasteage of coffee beans. One of the most important things about making coffee is to be able to repeat a good brew – and to do this you need to be able to be as consistent as possible with what you do. Tamping is one area where there can be great variations – and a good tamper can help to eliminate most of those variables, thereby helping you to achieve more consistent brews. Depending on their configuration, espresso machines typically provide between 9 and 15 bar
