Technique
How to Tamp Espresso Correctly
Tamping looks simple and is one of the more common sources of an inconsistent shot — mostly because the mistakes are invisible until you see the extraction go wrong.
Level the puck before you tamp
A distribution tool or a simple back-and-forth shake levels the grounds in the basket before tamping, which matters more to an even tamp than tamping pressure itself. Tamping down onto an unevenly distributed pile of grounds compresses the high spots more than the low spots, no matter how careful the tamp itself is.
Tamp level and straight down
A tamp that goes in at an angle compresses one side of the puck more than the other, creating an easy path for water to channel through on the low side. Watching the tamper's top surface, not the basket, is a simple way to check you are staying level as you press down.
Consistent pressure matters more than a specific number
There is no single correct tamping force — what matters is applying roughly the same pressure, the same way, every time, so tamping is not one more variable changing between shots. A common approach is tamping until you feel the puck stop compressing further, which is naturally consistent without needing to measure force directly.
A simple self-check
After tamping, the puck surface should look flat and level with no visible tilt, and a light finger tap on the basket's edge should not visibly shift loose grounds. If either check fails, redistribute and re-tamp rather than proceeding — a bad tamp caught before the shot is much easier to fix than a channeled shot after the fact.