Video Overview | PuQ Press M5

The M5 electronic tamper from Puqpress fits under the Mahlkönig E80 Supreme, saving precious room on the counter and streamlining the puck-prep process. It offers five tamp settings and dozens of pressures to choose from, all in a simple and easy-to-navigate interface. In this video, Steve provides an overview of the M5 and its capabilities before showing each of the programs in action.

Transcript

Hey, I'm Steve with Prima Coffee. And today, we're going to take a look at the PuqPress M5. The M5 is an electronic tamper that fits underneath the E80 from Mahlkonig and it has the same contour so it's made to look like it fits there seamlessly and like they were made to be together. So, we see the M5 being a really great option for small cafes that don't have a lot of room on their counter so that you don't have to have a tamping mat, tampers, and other accessories like distribution tools. And, all you need to do is have one footprint for both the grinder and the tamping. It's also really good for large cafes, so high-volume cafes where you need to pump out a lot of espresso shots really quickly, you can grind and tamp in about six seconds. And, if you add in some kind of distribution, such as with the Pullman chisel here, you can probably do all of that in about 10 seconds. That does mean that you can probably, in under a minute, you know, dose, tamp, pull the shot, dump out the PUQ, clean the portafilter and start again. And so, for a high-volume cafe, this makes a lot of sense. So, the first step to get the M5 going is to get it under the E80. So, to do that, you're going to want to pull it to the corner or the side of your counter because you got to feed the cable of the E80 through the M5 and out the back. And, this is a two-person job because the E80 is very heavy and you need to be able to sort of put it on top and feed it through at the same time. So, it fits in the grooves, the two legs on the front of the E80 will fit into the grooves on the front of the M5, and then the back two legs will just rest on there. And, as long as it is sort of stable, then you know that it is in its position. The M5 will fit most standard 58-millimeter portafilters, including bottomless portafilters, although we have seen that bottomless portafilters will fit a little differently in here, so do keep that in mind when you are setting the portafilter forks. So to do that, you're going to want to turn off the M5 because you're going to get your hand in there and you just want to make sure that you don't have the piston coming down on your hand. To set the portafilter forks, you just need to use the tool that they've sent with you, this wrench, to loosen both of these bolts here. And then, there is a wheel underneath here if you can see that. It's easier if you take out the tray. There's a wheel at the bottom here that you can turn to raise or lower those forks and that you can get this into position. Then, you can go ahead and tighten those bolts. Now that we have that in there, we can turn on the grinder. And, we do recommend some kind of distribution stage here. We find that the flow is much better on the shots when you do something like the Pullman chisel. And yeah, you can see there how level and even that is. So, that was on the first program. There are five total programs on the M5. They call that one the Speedy, it's a double tamp in one and a half seconds. And then, they also have a program, the second one on here, which is is the same but it has a slow sort of retreat to the piston. There's another one where the pressure is lowered. It also has a slow retreat. And then, there's one called the Hulk, and that one is three tamps. And then, there is a single tamp on here.

So, five total programs that you can mess around with. And you can toggle those over here by just holding the bottom button, which is the clean button, until the piston retracts and it goes back up, and now you're in program mode. And then, you can toggle sort of up and down to choose whichever program for tamping style that you want, and hit that bottom button again and that will lock in the program. There are probably going to be a lot of questions about how each of those programs and sort of which one is the best program for me. Each of those programs affects the espresso shot and all we can say is that it's going to take some experimenting. They're all going to be a little different in the flow. But, of course, it's going to be determined somewhat by how much you're dosing in, which baskets you're using, and all of that. So, just what we can say is there's a lot of variables that you can mess with as far as each of the tamping programs, and also all the pressures that you can choose from. And so you got to choose the best one that works for you. So, it's very simple and intuitive to toggle between the different pressures. There is a plus sign here and a minus sign here. So, to go higher in pressure hit the plus, to go lower you hit the minus and it goes lower. You have between 22 pounds and 66 pounds for every program except for program number two. You will see that it goes as low as 11 pounds. So, this is the more gentle tamp and only as high as 33 pounds. It's also very easy to clean the piston here. So, any coffees getting on the piston, it's causing the PUQs to erode and causing a lot of channeling, you just hit the Set button. The piston will descend, it'll show you that it's in CL, so cleaning mode, and that will allow you to go ahead and wipe away any coffee that is caught there on the piston. When you hit the Set button again, it goes back into its place. Also, if you want to do a deep clean on this, you can take the E80 off and they've included a couple of tools. Like we said, this one here is a socket wrench to adjust the tamping fork. But, they also include an Allen wrench. So, if you get the E80 off of here, you can basically unscrew the piston from the top, and then you'll be able to screw it out from the bottom there and clean it off and then get it back into its place. That is the M5 from PuqPress. As you can see it fits really nicely under your E80 to save space. It's really fast and efficient, and the tamping is consistent and flat every time.