In this video Luke is telling us all about the La Marzocco Swift commercial coffee grinder and why he thinks it's a good choice for a busy cafe looking to maintain a certain level of consistency and quality. The Swift grinder has been around for quite sometime and features 64mm flat burr grinder blades and not only grinds but distributes the coffee in the basket and tamps it too. The ability of the grinder to consistently take care of this process helps eliminate inconsistencies between baristas meaning your customers coffee experience will not differ too greatly from day to day. For this reason alone it's certainly a good choice. As mentioned above the grinder is quite old now and somewhat dated in its appearance. It would be nice to see La Marzocco look at modernising the grinder somewhat with some new tech like an LCD screen to monitor whats happening and make adjustments. Some cosmetic changes would be nice to freshen up it's look so it would look more at home in a modern cafe.
Unedited Video Transcript
Hey guys today we're looking at the
swift grinder from La Marzocco
So if you've been looking around at the
cafes over years you may have seen
one of these in your favorite cafe the
La Marzocco swift has been around for many
years
it's not a new grinder but when it came
out it was certainly revolutionary
it was the only grinder that would allow
you to have two
different types of beans being ground
and tamped direct into your portafilter
handle
at the same time so way ahead of its
time
when it came out it's still being used
today across a lot of different cafes
allowing people to have a more
consistent grind being able to have
multiple coffees in quite a small
compact space but also just being able
to pump it out all day long
and not having to always worry about the
grind
or the packing or the dose that can be a
huge challenge when using
lots of baristas to tamp or process your
ground coffee
so just some of the specs you can see
that has two
individual hoppers there they are 1.8
kilos
sometimes on a smaller low denser roast
you can actually fit about two kilos in
there which is really good
and it is two individual grinding motors
and grinding blades so if one dies the
other one will still work nicely
to grind those beans it's a 64 mil
ceramic burr
so that's there to help counteract with
the heat while it is just being
used over and over again and the grind
will then come into the front tamping
mechanism
which will actually tamp and polish the
actual
grind so it's quite a cool unique little
grinder
to adjust the grind you've actually got
a
turn dial knob on here which goes off to
a gearing mechanism
so it's really easy to be able to fine
tune your grind
on the actual dial it talks about it
being faster or slower
and that is in relevance to your actual
extraction speed
so if you don't have people that are
really in tune with
whether using a finer grind or a coarser
grind and which way to go
it certainly makes it a lot easier for
anyone to understand how to change the
extractions
the grinder comes with all the cleaning
tools you need which is a
big long sort of fluffy brush and a
pokey stick
and i'll show you how to use these when
we actually do a video on how to clean
and look after your La Marzocco swift grinder
but for now i want to show you how it
actually works and grinds beautiful
coffee
we'll grab beans we can open them up and
pop in the hopper
it's nice and easy just chuck your lid
up
fill some beans in and you've got to
make sure that the actual hopper slide
is all the way
open at the same time it's actually
going to lock in that hopper so it can't
come out which is nice and handy
pop the lid back on and i'm going to
turn it on
so the machine is allowing us to pop in
the handle
and then we're going to select whether
we're going to grind for the left hand
side of the grinder or the right hand
side of the grinder
when we lock it in there is no seal in
here like a coffee group handle
so you don't want to be jamming that on
you want to be a bit more gentle with it
so when you lock it in you'll hear a
little switch
activate and that means that it knows
that the handle's in place and it's
ready to grind
so as long as you're just putting a
little bit of pressure as you
swing your hand off to the side that's
going to be perfect ready
to hit the grind button once we hit this
button
this is the grinding stage so it's
grinding and pushing it
all the way through into the shaft
and then it's going to activate the
tamping mechanism once it's released
some pressure
it will then polish the coffee and tamp
it for us
and simply remove it and that gives us
your ground coffee
one thing i want to note about the
ground coffee is that there is a little
bit of excess
grind around the outside now some people
will just simply
tip it out and get rid of that if you're
dosing lower in a basket the way i see
it is those grinds can be picked
up by the water that's going to come in
and then it's going to float around and
essentially add to your extraction a
little bit there
so it's really up to you which way you
go but you do end up with a beautifully
nice polished
flat surface ready to go popping it
straight into your coffee machine
so is this grinder perfect in its
tamping and perfect in its coffee
distribution
i would beg to differ there are a few
things that
are a bit of a challenge when we look
into the coffee sciences
of things but it is really good so if
you are not prepared to
distribute your coffee use an ocd have a
standardized tamping
puck press or something like that and be
weighing your grind every single time
this is a really easy answer that's
going to give you a good consistent
cup of coffee and that's why we use it
so if you've got high volume and
multiple baristas
you're going to get a nicely tamped
coffee that is always
going to be the same dose giving you a
very
consistent extraction every time so
before i get into a bit more detail on
how this coffee is distributed and
actually tamped
let me show you how the unit actually
works
firstly you'd be taking this top little
cover off
and there's actually a lever in the top
here and it's a break and if you can
imagine this is a big drill press which
is spinning around
so if we push it backwards we're going
to stop that drill press from spinning
we pop our hand underneath and to undo
it you can actually push on the flat
side of the propeller and there you have
your
propeller or impeller or i don't know
specifically what they call this thing
but essentially that is what is sitting
on top of the coffee
as it's grinding the coffee is falling
through and being distributed
and then it goes into the polishing
stage once this has actually got enough
coffee underneath it it
raises this propeller activating a
switch
and then it goes into its tamping mode
so you can adjust
how high that's going to dose you can
also adjust how long that's going to
tamp for as well
that's done inside the grinder it's not
easy to do but your tech can do that for
you
so essentially that's what's happening
inside the unit
and it's either taking beans from the
right hand side
or the left hand side and it's falling
into a common chamber
so it's pretty easy to to see how the
grinder works
and to put it back in you would simply
just hold that back
find the center pin
make it look nice and easy on tv
hold your tongue right and you can get
that back in so you don't have to do it
up too tight
and essentially that's ready to go again
now what does that propeller do to the
coffee
so when we look at the shape of this
propeller
and we look at our coffee what is it
going to do to this coffee puck
because there is about a one centimeter
flat spot there
technically no coffee is really going to
get underneath that when it's being
distributed
it'll fall on the outside and down these
gaps
but it doesn't really get into the
middle so naturally this will make the
coffee flow down
the middle of the puck and if you do
feel it it is nice and firm on the
outside but the in the middle is just a
little bit softer
so that is the only negative thing about
how the actual grinder will grind and
work
but overall it's still a very consistent
amount of coffee
and it's going to give you a consistent
extraction all the time
because it'll do the same thing every
single time
all right so it's in pop your lid back
on
a little tip this is normally screwed
down
but once you take those screws off to
get access to it we put a bit of blue
tack in there just to stop it from
vibrating
essentially the other thing the grinder
has is a couple little inspection holes
here
which is what these are used for to
clean inside
when is there an issue with the grinder
it's going to tell you so
if you've already got coffee in there
and you go to press it again
it'll actually just flash at you and
that'll remind you that it's already
activating the switches
it knows it's already got coffee in the
handle if you don't have it
activated by that switch it's going to
flash at you as well so it's going to be
aware of what stage you're at
when you're putting that handle in let's
talk about the elephant in the room
it's not a pretty thing it looks like
it's still stuck in the 80s
and it could certainly do with some
modernizing you know being able to maybe
change the color
a lot of people love a powder coated
color a white green red blue whatever
your thing is it'd be great to be able
to
customize this for your cafe could we
have a bit more information displayed up
here on an lcd screen
yeah we could maybe some grind time how
much grinds actually being
allocated to the handle or even just a
counter to tell us
that it's actually only got three
seconds two seconds to go before it's
ready
there's a lot of grinders out there that
have really excelled in this area
again we know this has been around for a
long time is it ready for an update
possibly it would be amazing to see the
new generation of a swift grinder
if it was made today and just some of
those cool features that we'd be able to
see
for our cafes the back of it doesn't
really look that nice and that's
actually what the customers see
so maybe making that a nice logo on
there because right now
it doesn't have anything
that's what a customer sees when they
walk up to the counter
so this whole space could be far nicer
representing the brand
not just from the user side of things
other than that hey i think it's a great
grinder
it's lasting the test of time i'd love
to hear your comments about it
thanks very much guys have an awesome
