Ernie1 I can understand why it’s happening but as a Mazzer afficionado (nerd) I do find it a bit frustrating and slightly odd that those grinders have become an unlikely benchmark against single dosers. It’s exactly like taking a Niche to a busy coffee shop and saying “Well it’s just nowhere near as fast, there’s no timer and I can’t even fit a kilo in the hopper”.
Simply based on a matching burr set, It’s not really a fair comparison to say a dedicated, ground-up single doser does a much better job of being low retention and better at single dosing than a commercial grade on-demand grinder which has been MacGyver’d into a single doser with vary levels of professionalism. I’d almost be tempted to see how it does exclusively in the cup against a factory on-demand commercial. Obviously retention and bean switching goes out the window, but flavour wise, it could be pretty close with fresh beans.
These are excellent points. The comparison with a commercial grade grinder is an odd one…certainly the party pieces of low retention, easy “home use” workflow vs something made to do shot after shot in a commercial environment is unfair. The Mazzer commercial design imperatives are:
- Hugely Robust for shot after shot after shot all day long in quick succession
- Fast
- easy to use for the specific environment
- tend to use one coffee, so adjustability (from one bean to another) is not super important
- experienced baristas
The above are not the same design imperatives behind the Niche
The things that are not so critical, or not critical at all for these big Mazzer grinders:
- retention
- dose consistency down to 0.2g
- exchange amounts
- ease of cleaning (because they are not often cleaned in commercial environments
- easy, fast adjustment for different beans (not really adjusted in commercial environments, they often remove the adjustment lever)
- High accuracy of burr alignment (for technical reasons, one being weight of beans in the hopper)
The Niche is for the home market and the only reason people had large commercials is there was nothing else at the time. now we have a plethora of choice in the prosumer market, that 10 or 15 years ago was an old commercial grinder, or a Mazzer Mini/Mini E. The Conte Valerio (Eureka Mignon was just appearing on the scene.
As for flavour, that’s subjective…I guess if the Niche was on a par with a Major, that alone would be a great achievement. I have tried it against the EG1 and I couldn’t taste the difference…I then tried it against the P100 with HU SSP coated burrs and preferred the Duo. This could just be my particular taste preferences, but I did put up the photo of the fines in the cup. Generally though I can tell if somethings good or not without fear of unconscious bias. If I find myself using one thing in preference to another and doing it a lot….then I subconsciously have a preference for using that thing. I’m just going to pop downstairs and take a photo right this second.
The top image is the Utility room with 3 Duos, the second image is the Lagom P100. It’s next to the ECM Barista Max which I was Engineering testing for ECM directly. I want to move the Duo, as I keep having to go to the utility room to grind. The only reason I haven’t moved the P100 is it’s so flipping heavy and just a ballache to move, but later today it’s going in the Utility room. I have 2 more tests for the P100, more involved filter testing and I want to tentatively grind a few green beans in it first, then move to 18g and see what happens. I promise to video 18g of green beans in the P100 if I do it….it’s not my grinder though, so don’t want to break it.
So yes, just as I think the comparisons with commercial grinders are wrong as they are intended for a different use…I think this is so wrong as well. Apparently Schomer has Niches in all his locations….which amazed me.
