In the world of COFFEE GRINDERS there are so many options available and it can be quite difficult to choose the right one to suit your needs. The MAZZER KONY & ROBUR are a tried and tested grinder that are extremely reliable and as such are a popular choice for many baristas and cafe owners. In this video Luke takes a closer look and discusses some of the POSITIVES AND NEGATIVES of the grinders and why they are still A GREAT CHOICE for most cafes.
Video Transcript
Mazzer grinders, the Robur or the Kony. Which ones right for you? Stick around and we'll go through it.
If you've been in the industry for a while you would have had a Mazzer grinder. It may have been an old flick doser or if you’ve had the joy of working on an electronic grinder like this it's definitely made your life a lot easier. I just want to take you through the features of these grinders, what I like and what we don't like about them.
So both these grinders are the electronic option and that's what I'm focusing on today with the Robur and the Kony. They both have the same interface, they're really easy to use. You can see there is a big size difference between the two. Essentially these grinders are very similar but there's a few key things which are different.
In the Robur you're going to get a 1.6 kilo hopper. In the Kony you’re going to get a 1.3. How you adjust the grind is identical in both of these but in the actual grinding blades that's where you're going to see the big difference. The Robur has a 71 mil blade and the Kony has a 63 mil blade. Now that is a big difference! Every time it's going to turn it's going to shave more off your bean and give you a faster grind as it's coming out your spout.
When you think about it, the other main factor is how powerful is the motor? The Robur is a 900 watt, the Kony is 350 watts. So how does this affect you in your service everyday? If we're going to base on getting 22 grams of coffee out of a Robur it's going to be just under four seconds with a new set of blades. In a Kony that's going to be more about seven seconds. So those three seconds can really help you out when you're doing coffee after coffee. So if you've got a high demand, big volume café, the Robur is going to be the one that's going to pump it out for you. If you're in a coffee trailer or you've got a power issue you would certainly look at the Kony. With a smaller volume of coffee running through it, it's going to handle a good 10 kilo day where your Robur is going to be at least at 20 kilos a day. So when these grinders came into the market they really filled a gap. We were doing this big flicking out of the front dosing chamber and it was a lot of work. The fact that we could just simply press a single button or a double button and get coffee on demand which was fresh ground and hadn't been sitting in a doser for half a day just changed the way coffee was tasting.
So these grinders really did have a great impact in the coffee scene in Australia. So the thing that Mazzer do is build a bulletproof grinder. These things just go and go and go. They don't break down. They'll keep pumping out grind when the blades are really dead. They don't really jam up. They essentially are a bulletproof grinder but they do have their flaws.
So the biggest thing about these Mazzer grinders is that they can change their grind from coarse to fine really easily and a couple of the reasons why that's going to happen is it could have work worn out blades in there or it could actually be the lock isn't tight and that is the one thing that I always walk into a cafe and I see. So I'm going to show you that this lock has to be locked all the way down. A lot of the time that pin is just sitting totally in a different spot or it's not even in the café. If that isn't allocated in the same hole as this little washer that can only move a certain amount of distance, it's going to spin the motor, grab onto a bean and then change that grind and that's going to be really hard for you to get back to a place for a great extraction. Now the other thing which is a real issue when we've got a button that allows the motor to run for a set amount of time we need to make sure the beans are falling evenly from the hopper onto the blades. I know it sounds silly for the amount of times this hopper slide has been closed or partially closed. When we've walked up to test a grinder the baristas feel a bit silly but that is their issue.
So using the Mazzer grinders is really easy. There's a switch on the side, the green light is going to come on and the menu up top is going to illuminate and show you how many coffees you've actually ground this one is showing 267 at the moment. Now to use that menu, it's very easy. You have two buttons, a single dose and a double dose. Then you've got a manual dosing button. You have your menu which you press and hold to access into the menu and you've got your plus and minus and they're going to allow you to adjust the time then you're going to allocate to the single dose or the double dose button. So these grinders have proven themselves to be bulletproof, pump out heaps of coffee day in day out. Is the conical blade the right one for you? Look until when these came out these were amazing grinders, they really did step up and change the ability to pump out far more coffee because the conical blades could grind more coffee in a short amount of time. A lot has changed recently with the introduction of big flat burr grinders, so you may be thinking is this still the grinder for you or what I look at something new?
Now for what I don't like about these grinders. In the world we are in now where we're weighing grinds and weighing doses we can check how accurate these grinders are. If you're running a coarse grind these are actually going to be reasonably accurate but as soon as you start going to a finer grind and wanting to get a larger amount of coffee there's a few issues are going to happen with these grinders. They do need to be cleaned out quite regularly. So inside the grinder in the grinding chamber as it's coming out you can get a long sausage of grind that's going to be retained and held back until you do your next dose. So if that falls into the next pre-set amount of time you can get a gram or gram and a half at least of coffee added to your next dose. Or if all the coffee falls out and you grind again you'll actually have an under dose of coffee when you press the time and you can be up to 2 grams difference in these grinders. So when you do a grind change we have to clear how much grind is past the blade and in the internal chamber of the grinder. There's also the grinding chute.
Now with a Kony we tell people to generally get rid of one good handle and that's about 22 grams we're talking. When you actually weigh that out it can be up to 30 or 35 grams of coffee that's still stuck in there so if you're not clearing that in between each grind change you're going to find yourself lost between a coarse grind and a fine grind and too much dose because the time isn't allocated to that grind and you'll be completely lost. So that's probably the biggest issue we have with these grinders and this is the same issue you're going to have with a Kony. But the retention of coffee is going to be less so you still want to purge that one good handle to make sure that you aren't clearing the old grind before you make a decision to change either your time or your grind. You'll notice on these grinders we have just these nice easy stirrups to sit our handle on. When you're trying to dose 20 grams of coffee or more into a big basket you will have to tap it to collapse that coffee. There are different attachments where you can have the handle sit on a rest if you so wish it's only good if you're going to have the smaller amounts of coffee say fourteen or an 18 gram basket.
All in all these are a great grinder they're bulletproof, you can get parts from anywhere and they're really easy to service if something is to go wrong. If you're looking to invest in a grinder and it lasts you a long time these are going to be your best return on investment by far across any other grinder.
So are you a lover of a Mazzer grinder or do you have another preference? Make sure you leave us a comment down below hit the subscribe button and you'll be notified every time we pop up another video.
Thanks for watching. Have a great day!
