Tampers: $52-$54 (US Dollars)
Tamping Stand: $40 (US Dollars)
Tamper Hanger: $8 (US Dollars) |
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One of the great people of coffee and espresso is a fellow by the name of Paul Pratt. You may know him through this website - he's written a few articles here and there. He's the La Marzocco guy in Hong Kong, and a very skilled machine restorer. He's also a helluva nice guy.
Pratt has a fascination for all things espresso, and a few years back that extended into becoming the manufacturer and designer of the things we use for espresso - namely tampers, knock boxes, and tamping stands. He founded a company several years back called Bumper, and they produced one of our absolute favourite tampers in the CoffeeGeek Lab - a clone of sorts of La Marzocco's iconic (yet plastic) tamper - but the Bumper version was in dense rubber and solid steel. It was a work of art, and to be honest, it is what La Marzocco's tamper really should be (sidenote - to this day I'm surprised and shocked that La Marzocco didn't just get Pratt to make these for their company to replace the plastic tamper they ship with their machines; after all, they hired him to design a limited run tamping stand for their company).
That wasn't the only Bumper tamper - there were several designs - and it wasn't even the only Bumper product. Pratt designed a great tamping stand that was convertible between standard portafilters and chopped models. He also designed a few knock boxes that featured great industrial design. His tamping stand was so good that the design was (unfortunately) copied by a less than ethical US company after Pratt would no longer do business with them.
Bumper is Pratt's past though: his present is even more ambitious. It is a new company and a new line of products under the Cafelat brand name, and the company is as much a design firm (including patents this time around) as it is a manufacturer. Cafelat presents some of the best-designed accessories and tools made for coffee and espresso, but at surprisingly good prices. We have the entire crop of Cafelat products in the CoffeeGeek Lab, and for this article, we're presenting a first look at the line of Cafelat tampers and accessories.
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