Anyone agree Mazzer ZM will be a game changer?
Always thought Mazzer looks and finish was top drawer, pretty sure the ZM will be equally easy on the eyes.

The ZM looks great. Less than 0.5g retention. 83mm burrs. But looks like you'll need to take the hopper off for any chance at putting it under standard cabinets.

James Mulryan wrote:Anyone agree Mazzer ZM will be a game changer?
Always thought Mazzer looks and finish was top drawer, pretty sure the ZM will be equally easy on the eyes.

Game changer? Uh, looks like a knock-off of a Mahlkonig EK, which predates it by nearly a decade. What makes it so special?

Also they clearly market it as a filter grinder which to me indicates that its lacking precise adjustments needed for espresso.

uscfroadie wrote:Game changer? Uh, looks like a knock-off of a Mahlkonig EK, which predates it by nearly a decade. What makes it so special?

That was my first thought as well.

ZM features sets of burrs specically studied and
designed to grind either filter coffee or espresso

The lowest coffee retention ever seen, <0.45g
1 bean you grind, 1 bean you get ground

Perfect burrs parallelism to get perfect particle size distribution of coffee grounds

Micrometrical grind adjustment mechanism to get Maximum precision

All of this tells me it's designed for espresso, as well. They seem to have noticed the demand for tighter tolerances of burr alignment. They know people want a baby EK43. They know people want less retention for home use. They seemed to have packed everything that people want into one grinder + the it being made by Mazzer. It might not be a game changer in the espresso world, since smaller manufacturers have put out a similar product before, however, for Mazzer this is pretty big.

At SCA in Seattle Mazzer indicated there would be more than one set of burrs for the ZM. Three if I recall correctly, Drip, Espresso and Turkish but I reserve the right to be wrong. Burr spacing is set via buttons. Their demonstration was its ability to grind one bean at a time with basically no retention.

Ira

From the Mazzer web site:
"Optional: 1,3 kg (2,9 lbs) hopper and burrs to grind espresso coffee"

The ZM appears to have something that no other grinder for home or commercial use has to offer at this moment : full digital authority over zeroing, setting and alignment of the grinder's burrs.
We have to wait a little to see how that translates in the cup. I'm under the impression that this is conceived only to appease the geeky ego of many enthusiasts willing to shell out money in exchange for PID control over everything, in their quest for a better coffee. The standard 'filter' burr set is a clear signal. Also the growing specialty espresso coffee market (single origins, in droves, to entice a more demanding and conscious customer now more and more exposed to espresso as opposed to brewed coffee drinks ) can probably avoid , with such a machine, to have one grinder per selection of coffee offered: my roaster offers always 3-5 different roasts, and must maintain a platoon of 3 small grinders to flank his Malkoenigs on the bar. The small boys are 58-64mm and he suffers a lot at each grind as he would clearly prefer wider beasts, but too much space is already taken by the Marzocco machine and other bulky equipment... Maybe one grinder with negligible retention (and easy to digitally re-set) can take the place of them all. We will see, even if not in Italy for the time being as the market for such specialty coffee and single origins here is really small.

I do not believe there is anything digital in the alignment arena. I though that but eventually was told that the burrs are check to be as parallel as currently possible and the grinder is made with the burr carriers as parallel as currently possible. Which is conceptually as good as it get's today. Until they start to appear we won't know how they do on the sharpie test and how difficult it is to align them if they fail the sharpie test.

Ira