A big heavy monster tamper you will happily tamp your way through life with.
Positive Product Points
A nice addition to the home espresso corner. Very solid. You won't regret the purchase.
Negative Product Points
Maybe just a little bit TOO HEAVY! Won't necessarily fit your basket, even on a commercial espresso machine.
Detailed Commentary
After wasting way too much time on alt.coffee, not to mention this site, it finally dawned on me that my ill-fitting aluminum tamper, received eons ago as a gift, was a net negative in my espresso making.
Please note that there was not the option to say I had owned this thing for 1 week, which is the truth, so I chose 1 month. Ordinarily I would not review a product I'd owned for so short a time, but hey, it's a tamper not a space shuttle . . . . . I've done maybe 50 tamps with it which I think is plenty to evaluate it.
After reading Mark CoffeeGeek's review on the 5 tampers I thought that maybe I could afford $32 to test drive this tamper. By coincidence I had decided to buy some new PF baskets for my La Cimbali Jr. being as the original ones were 6+ years old, so I did so in the same order. Although EPNW does not carry La Cimbali, they indicated they had replacement PF baskets that would fit my PF holders. I'm sure glad I bought them because they did fit my PF holders, but must be hundredths of a mm. larger than the original ones and fit the tamper well. My original PF baskets were really too tight a fit to use this tamper.
I like the tamper a lot. It does make tamping much easier and more efficient than the crappy ill-fitting aluminum one I've been using forever. I think my shots are better.
The damn thing is however, TOO HEAVY! I live in fear it is going to fall off my kitchen counter and strike my poor dumb dog in the head, instantly killing her. Failing that it is going to make one huge dent in the wood flooring. Although the weight seems to help with the tamping, I think it is slightly too heavy for the obligatory reverse flip of the PF basket, although once you get the hang of working with this heavy monster you can make it work.
I'm probably being too critical. This is one nice tamper and you will be glad when you see the UPS man pull up to your door, tamper in box.
Buying Experience
This was bought online from espressoparts.com ; there was one thing missing from stock on my order and they called to alert me to this and to give me the option of shipping out the rest of the order immediately and the last item to follow later. As it turned out instead of the item being backordered for a week as they had said the entire order was shipped 2 days after the phone call (same day as order placed online).
