I am new to this forum and not sure whether I can post my concern here. I am going to take up a raw coffeehouse in my home town this month. But now I need an espresso machine for my cafe and one of my friends who suggests me la marzocco Linea classic. I searched in online about this and found many reviews. I am totally confused now, anyone who knows more about this, please share your views.

Hi. I'm certainly not a pro and have no direct experience with the Linea. However I know of a coffee shop (the only decent one in these parts) who have one. They love it. They call it "a real workhorse". They have had no negative issues with it for over a year. Teamed up with a Mazzer E I have yet to have a bad shot from them.

Linea's are great machines, but one of your first considerations should be whether there's anyone in your area that distributes them and can service them. Buying from a local distributor will hopefully get you at least a short lesson on how to install it and maintain it correctly. If it's a good distributor they'll test your water, recommend a filtration system, help you install it and give you a thorough run-down on daily, weekly and monthly maintenance procedures.

Bob is right; Linea's are solid, workhorse machines. At some point, though, you will inevitably run into an issue with it and having a qualified technician that's familiar with your particular machine is invaluable.

Both of the above posters make valid points. However, I think we need to back up and discuss things like how many groups you want, projected sales volume, how many baristas will be working the machine, what kind of training they'll have, etc.; not to mention what options you'll want, like a shot timer, volumetric dosing, etc., before choosing one machine over all of the other possibilities.

If you don't know enough about espresso generally to consider yourself an accomplished barista, you could probably use some training both in that and managing a shop dedicated to things coffee. Maybe that should come first.

Rich

+1

Lineas are great machines though. It represents a good value in the LM line and I actually like its aesthetic quite a lot. Last year they added paddle groups as an option, which makes the machine that much more versatile.

I have to respectfully disagree.. all the paddles do is add significantly more maintenance into the equation when a Linea is involved. All of the extra parts to rebuild the paddles, the time involved for the tech to do the job, the down time on the machine because it needs to be off while being serviced, plus the realitivly short time between maintenance, paddles on a Linea aren't the greatest idea. Sure! You can "preinfuse" one group at a time as long as no other groups are being used, but...