Coffee People: Daniel Kurnianto, BOSeTamper™️

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Left: An engineer working on a circuit board looks over at the camera. Right: The engineer is focused on his work and stares down at circuit boards under construction. — Photos courtesy of @BOSeTamper on Facebook.

Guest: Daniel Kurnianto, M.S.
Company: BOSeTAMPER™️ or Boston Electric Tamper/Radik Labs, LLC
Role: Inventor & Founder
Based: Boston, MA
Online: bosetamper.com • @bosetamper
What they drink: Latte

How it works:

Add grinds to portafilter.
Power on BOSeTAMPER™️.
Set BOSeTAMPER™️ on top of portafilter.
Twist.
Remove BOSeTAMPER™️.

For those of us who struggle to tamp coffee into a perfect puck every time (like the great baristas at our favorite roasters), the BOSeTAMPER™️ makes it pretty easy.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Daniel is an engineer by trade but a tinkerer by any standard.
He and his family emigrated from Indonesia to Boston about fifteen years ago. He’s been inventing and starting businesses ever since.
Covid lockdowns inspired a new passion for making coffee at-home. Since Daniel is an espresso person, he decided to invest in an at-home espresso machine.
He found it challenging to achieve a consistently great tamp. There is a lot of practice that goes into properly tamping coffee before pulling a shot of espresso.
Daniel tried to figure out a way to make it easier to repeat his results. What started as a passion project grew with the positive feedback his idea for the automatic tamper received in the Master’s program he was taking at night.
The first BOSeTAMPER™️ prototypes were ready for the Specialty Coffee Association return post-COVID show in Boston, right down the road from his home. The response was enough for Daniel to keep pushing forward.
Developing a product requires testing components and more components and tweaking. When you find a component you like—for example, the battery or housing—you lean on that vendor to continue to produce that product. If they go out of business, change their prices, or update their product line, you may be starting over. Inventing a product isn’t for the faint of heart or those who don’t like the process of wading through the problems, seemingly endlessly, for those Wow! It works! moments.
With the BOSeTAMPER™️, Daniel really came at the challenge of design from the perspective of the user—thinking through all the challenges he was facing trying to produce an excellent shot of espresso. His perspective is part of the reason the current version of the tamper recently won the Red Dot award product design, which is a pretty big deal, but…
That doesn’t mean things are easy. Setbacks—like Daniel’s recent struggles with one of his vendors—are a real gut punch. Inventors have to find things to keep pushing them forward, and for Daniel it has been his, his family, and other industry professionals belief in the product.

Close up shots of the BOSe Tamper automatic coffee tamping device. — A Coffee Cycle Roasting sighting on the @BOSeTamper Facebook page!

COFFEE SMARTER PRO

Nick Schmitt, Specialty Coffee Ambassador at Roastar, joined the show to offer some detail on what goes into the price of your coffee packages. This is a must-listen for any small business roaster looking to expand into packaging for retail. Listen on Spotify or check out the full post below.