A couple of days ago a "care package" of sorts came in the mail: a gaggle of new tampers from Reg Barber.

Reg missed the cutoff date for my 2003 Espresso Tamper Shootout article, but the are of sufficient note that I've added a sidebar to the article, and well, I'm mentioning them here.

Reg has been fooling with his classic design a bit, and he's been using new woods as well. The result are several different designs. For the longest time, "Reg Barber" indicated a specific tamper design, but no longer. Small "ball" tampers, sharp "stubbie" tampers, and all aluminum tampers now come out of the House of Reg.

He's also experimenting with different woods, and has a new tamper design in the stubby, ball and classic shape - I'm not sure of the wood type, but it's similar to beech wood. He's also been adding a gloss coat to the handles, which adds to the overall quality of the product.

Stumpy Reg! The "stumpy' Reg Barber, short design, steel base, polished, glossed handle.	Blond Stumpy The Stumpy Reg, in the blond wood colour, with steel flat base.
The Alu Reg All aluminum Reg Barber, with flat base and 'stumpy' shape.	The Blond Reg The classic Reg Barber tamper, in a blond wood finish, with steel base.

And the coolest thing? Reg custom made me a nice "CoffeeGeek.com" tamper. Slick!

Wait. There's a cooler thing. Because of Reg's generosity in the amount of tampers he sent me, if you're a registered member of CoffeeGeek, at some point in the near future, you'll get a chance to win one of these tampers - I'll be giving away a bunch of them in our next contest event. Stay tuned...

Other Coffee News
Not much to report, except for one thing - my seriously cool, customized, 110V La Marzocco Linea machine? It's on the fritz because of one of the customized parts - the overpressure valve that La Marzocco designed for the 2BAR steam boiler has given up the ghost, and failed - it's blowing off, no matter how fine I set the valve. LM is sending a new part pronto, but I'm without the use of the amazing La Marzocco for several days because of it.

In the meantime, I'm not hurting. I'm finalizing the Detailed Review for the Isomac Zaffiro (sent to me by Chris Coffee, and as far as espresso producing machines go, this thing is a total winner. I'm having some of the best shots I've ever had from a consumer / prosumer machine thanks to the Zaffiro.

Yet other stuff
It's always fascinating to me that sites like mine (and others) that can get as many as 500 or more visitors a day to pages like this, at best get a few left comments, or none at all - the last rant had a total of 1,900+ views, and zero comments. :)

I'm not the only person who experiences this - I've seen people who have very popular blogs, and with very few exceptions (like Chris Pirillo or that Wesley Crusher dude) yet they have at best one or two comments per entry.

Me? I love leaving feedback on other people's websites if I can. But hey, that's me.

Oops, gotta go eat dinner! Catcha later.