Pullman Espresso Accessories manufacturers, distributes and sells premium quality hand-made coffee tampers.

Proudly Australian Made
Pullman Tampers are and have always been proudly made right here in Australia by local craftsmen using local materials. This ensures the quality of our tampers is always at the highest possible standard, and the materials used are of the highest quality. As proof of what we know to be true, Pullman Tampers are the only tampers to have been independently verified by the Australian Made Campaign (http://www.australianmade.com.au) as being an Australian Made product; in fact, we qualified for the most stringent of all standards, "Product of Australia". This means "all significant components or ingredients must originate from Australia, and all, or virtually all, of the production processes must take place in Australia" (source: http://www.australianmade.com.au/logo).

So when you see the familiar green and gold kangaroo in association with our tampers, you can be certain you're getting a premium quality product made from premium quality materials right on our shores, and that every cent spent on a Pullman Tamper stays right here in Australia.


Tampers
Hundreds of coffee snobs have discovered why the Pullman Deluxe Tamper has become one of the most popular for Australian home baristas since 2002. In mid 2008 we released our second product, the Barista tamper, which is aimed more at commercial operators, however there's been a lot of interest from home users as well. Luca's made a bit of a list of what he likes about the Barista - check out Luca's 10 reasons to buy a Barista.

You can check out the details of either product at www.coffeetamper.com.au/products/

Roasters
We also have a partner store, Things Coffee, through which we sell the Hottop and Gene Cafe home roasters.

This came about as a result of some testing of the Gene and Hottop Robin and I undertook early in 2007, and the subsequent review I wrote up a few months later (www.coffeetamper.com.au/kb/reviews/gene-hottop/). We're now importing them direct from Hottop and covering the warranty ourselves, so you have the convenience of a local supplier, local currency and local support.

As with most products designed to serve a purpose, both 'sides of the fence' have their fans. There are a number of people whose opinions I respect who prefer the Gene Cafe to the Hottop and it would have been very easy to just follow everyone else and stay with a Gene Cafe. However I decided to check out the alternative myself and I'm glad I did! Robin and I were both very impressed with the Hottop unit which is why we both made this our personal roaster of choice, and subsequently decided to sell them as a product we believe in. However we still like the Gene in its own way and recognise some will prefer that, and it's certainly more affordable for some, so for this reason we're offering both products.

All our roasters come with free green beans to get you started plus a roasted sample of one of these varieties, and we've also got those great silver valved bags to ensure your coffee stays nice and fresh once it's roasted. Naturally you get some of these with your roaster too to make sure you have everything you need.

So drop in to www.thingscoffee.com.au, have a look around and set yourself up for fresher coffee than you've ever tasted! We'll be more than happy to help answer any questions you may have!

Greg and Robin

10 Reasons To Buy A Hottop

Hi CSers,

If you're like most of us and love freshly roasted coffee, there's no better way than to do it yourself. But just in case you think there's only one little home roaster out there, here's 10 reasons to consider a Hottop roasting solution:

1) Hottops are the only roasters readily available in Australia that allow you to save roast profiles to memory for simple subsequent roasts
2) The Hottop is the quietest roaster on the market, with a quiet motor and drum operation, and air flow via a quiet rotary fan (not a blower)
3) The built-in cooling tray on the Hottop means your beans are cool within four minutes of the roast finishing. This compares favourably to others which use internal cooling where it can take more than 10 minutes to do the same. The importance of cooling is explained in the first edition of BeanScene (p.65), where Ross Quail, Master Roaster at Jasper Coffee writes: "...a coffee that has taken a long time to cool presents itself as somewhat 'flat', 'lifeless' or with a 'baked' flavour...", a statement backed up with some real-world testing mentioned in that article. And he doesn't sell roasters either, he just knows what brings out the best in coffee and it sure ain't slow cooling.
4) Its design makes it easy to fit a bean mass temperature probe (such as the popular CS datalogging multimeter) so you can measure the actual bean temperature, rather than just the temperature of the air coming out of the roaster (which has little relationship to the bean temps). If you roast differing capacities of beans the difference between the bean temperatue and the air temperature will change, so not having a bean mass probe makes it very difficult to repeat a roast profile on a different amount of green bean. Bean mass probes can be purchased pre-installed when buying a Hottop from Things Coffee
5) Hottops give you control over the heater power AND the fan speed, giving you more flexibility over your roast
6) The use of smoke particle filters means it's a low smoke roasting solution, making roasting indoors far easier than with filter-less devices
7) The roaster is built around a metal chassis with chromed steel panels and a stainless steel drum, rather than a plastic shell and a glass drum
8) Because they heat via radiation rather than heating large volumes of air, the Hottop's 750W element consumes less power that some other roasters
9) The Hottop has a forced cooling and preheat cycle to ensure the drum is at the same temperature each time the beans are added. This leads to more repeatable roasts as the starting temperature is always the same
10) The Hottop B is the only roaster that can supply continuous intermediate power, which means perfectly smooth heating and no chance of burning beans - some other roasters apply 100% power until setpoint is reached, and then no power at all until it drops below setpoint - if you ask the B for 60% power it gives a continuous output of 60% power.

oh...
11) Unofficially they can roast over 500g of green beans. This isn't recommended of course and we'd never encourage that, but in our testing they handled 350g, 400g and 500g just as well as 250g, unlike some other products which started burning beans as soon as we passed 300g.

and...
12) They're locally imported and supported by Pullman Espresso Accessories, so you know you'll get great pre and post sales service!

Like every product, they're not perfect of course; they're more expensive than some others, they can be messier with chaff and the early D model Hottop got some bad press a few years ago (make sure you check which model Hottop they're referring to if reading a review) - but having used them extensively we're sure the good outweighs the bad!

As if that's not enough, if you're after a Pullman Tamper you can buy them together and combine freight, saving you the shipping cost of the tamper!

Orders can be placed at http://www.thingscoffee.com.au. Grab one of the most advanced roasting solutions available and put a permanent end to upgraditis!

Oh and reason 13... you only need one unit to get all this. So don't waste your money buying two inferior, cheaper, non-programmable units and still miss out on reasons 1-11. Like most things, you get what you pay for, so a unit for half the price is unlikely to be just as good, or even close to it.

Greg and Robin

P.S. Oh, and if you STILL decide you want a Gene Cafe after all that , we sell the Gene too 'cos they're still good little roasters for the price and we're quite happy to recognise the merits of both units. We just find, having impartially used both units, we'd rather save our pennies for a Hottop than settle for a Gene Cafe; but each to their own. Contact us if you'd like a special CS deal on one of these.

If you're looking at a Behmor they're a nice place to start and a good price, but they just don't cut it when it comes to programmable roasting and proper cooling. If you want to roast the way you want to roast you need a device which allows you to control the roast, and with the Behmor you're limited to its five built-in profiles.

World First - Brand New Home Roasters with Bean Mass Probes!



Passionate roasters know how important the temperature of the beans is and have been using bean mass probes in correttos for years. It's always been more difficult with more expensive devices - you simply can't get one into a Gene Cafe or a Behmor fullstop, and to install in a Hottop you normally have to modify the bean chute cover which interferes with simple loading of the beans. An alternative which we recently engineered is an internally mounted probe, but this is a much harder job and voids the roaster warranty - and who wants to do that to a brand new roaster? So why not purchase a brand new Hottop with a datalogging bean mass temperature probe professionally installed?? We believe this is the first time in the world it has been possible to purchase a domestic roaster with this feature factory-installed!

As this graph shows, the actual bean temperature can be anywhere from 0 to 30 degrees BELOW the reading on the Hottop control panel, or even slightly above! The bean cracks are critical milestones in a roast, and while a given type of bean will crack at almost exactly the same temperature every time, various factors such as the ambient temperature, roast capacity and roast profile may mean the air temperature required to get the beans to crack is different - and that's what's being measured by the roaster. Since the difference between the displayed temperature and the bean temperature CHANGES as the roast progresses, you can never be sure what temperature the beans are actually at! Without accurate bean temperature data, it can be quite hit and miss knowing how soon beans are going to crack and therefore what program changes to make in anticipation of that.



"What?", you say, "so the Hottop's temperature isn't even accurate?!" Before you panic, for safety reasons EVERY domestic roaster on the market (at the time of writing) employs an 'environmental' sensor, measuring the hottest part of the roaster - the temperature of the air inside the drum (or, in the case of the Gene Cafe, the air after it's left the drum) rather than the beans which are somewhat cooler. The Hottop's environmental sensor is in fact better than most as it sits extremely close to the beans so it's one of the most accurate environmental sensors out there. By employing an environmental sensor the manufacturers can be certain the device isn't going to overheat and catch fire. The environmental sensor can still give an approximate indication of the temperature of the beans but it's never an exact correlation.

This then is where the Hottop comes into its own. One of the beauties of the Hottop's design is its inherent ability to have a bean mass temperature probe fitted, which is simply a temperature sensor sitting in amongst the beans as they're roasting. The drum design of most other roasters makes such an installation impossible to perform, and thus this critical data remains hidden. A bean mass probe gives you an accurate figure of what the beans are doing, thus programming suddenly becomes a lot easier because you have accurate data to work on!

But wait, there's more! We're using the hugely popular CS Datalogging Multimeter with USB output for this project. This means you can connect the datalogger to a PC or laptop, watch a live graph of the bean temperature as the roast progresses, save a copy of the logged data for your records and make the sort of graph as seen on this page! It really does take an already brilliant roaster to another level altogether!

Available for purchase with new Hottop roasters through our store www.thingscoffee.com.au for $249. Can be fitted to existing roasters via arrangement.

Greg and Robin

PS This is a pic of my personal roaster with this sort of setup. Note that the unit in this picture is the older CS multimeter; the new ones we are installing are the new native USB versions with the curly yellow cord.

Got one of the older Hottop D units? Your control panel seen better days? We have a surplus of BRAND NEW D control panels which we'd love to see go to a good home. These may or may not come with a spare motherboard, cables and instructions pictured here but you'll get at least the panel (which let's face it, is the only part that's likely to wear out!). You'll need to pay the $15 for postage Australia-wide but apart from that we're giving these away - all we ask is that you make a donation to FairCrack of whatever amount you feel appropriate.

Email us enquiries[at]coffeetamper.com.au if you'd like one.
Greg and Robin