There's a problem with how most espresso is made. It's an insidious one; few people are aware of it, yet it ruins thousands of espressos around the world every day. Worse yet, even when the espresso isn't ruined, it's not as good as it could be, and people don't even realise it. That problem is inconsistent tamping.

To perfectly tamp, you need to get a perfectly flat angle against the coffee grounds, and you need to apply a completely consistent amount of pressure. Does that sound like something that most human beings will be able to do consistently? How about a few hundred times per day, in a high pressure, busy environment? It actually sounds pretty unlikely if you think about it, and yet, that's the expectation put on baristas pretty much everywhere. Even for the stellar few who might be able to achieve the consistency, the repetitive force applied at awkward angles often causes repetitive strain injuries.

It now seems almost painfully obvious that this is a job for a machine, not a human being, yet nobody seems to have realised it (or at least done something about it) until Puqpress came along. Thankfully Puqpress did come along, and now we have a whole range of clever little machines designed to do the job of tamping perfectly & consistently.