Product Comparison | La Marzocco Linea Mini and El Rocio Zarre
Transcript
Hey, it's Steve here from Prima Coffee, and today we're going to take a look at the Linea Mini from La Marzocco, next to the El Rocio Zarre. This is the second comparison video that we're doing with the Zarre. The first one we did was with the Lelit Bianca, and that is a little less expensive than the Zarre. And the Linea Mini here is a little more expensive than the Zarre. So this sits, kind of, between the two of them, and we are doing these comparisons so that you can make the right decision for you. The biggest difference that you're going to see between the Linea Mini and the El Rocio Zarre is going to be in the size. So the Linea Mini is going to be a lot more robust in the components. The biggest one is going to be that steam boiler. So you have a 3.5-liter steam boiler over here in the Linea Mini which is extremely powerful steam that you're going to see. Whereas, over here on the El Rocio Zarre, you have a steam boiler about half that size at 1.8 liters. The Linea Mini has a very small brew boiler though. It's 177 milliliters, it's what they say 6 ounces, and it's small because it is an integrated group, meaning it sits right here on top of that group head so that there's no heat loss between the boiler and that brew water. Over here on the Zarre, there's a little bit of distance between that brew boiler and the group, but this is a heated group to, sort of, compensate for that heat loss. And we've found, using a Scace, that both of these machines do an incredible job of keeping the temperature where you've set it here and very stable. Other internals, over here, you're going to have a rotary pump on the Linea Mini, and you're going to have two vibratory pumps on the El Rocio Zarre. Now we can talk about the kind of machines that these are. So the Zarre over here is a pressure profiling machine first, and that means that you can use this dial here to adjust the pressure of that pump in real time. But you can also program the shots by time. So it's an automatic machine as well. The Linea Mini is a semi-automatic machine, and that means that, to engage the brew, you're going to turn this paddle over. And to turn off the brew, you're going to bring it back into the stop position. And you're always going to do that. You can't program shots by time. You are, however, able to program the pre-infusion on the Linea Mini by using the app, and we'll go ahead and show you that here in a second. Whereas, over here, you're programming the pre-infusion, as well as the shot time if you want, here in the control center. So the way that you used to be able to set the Linea Mini's temperature, it used to be just all analog with this rotary dial. So you can see, it's, kind of, rudimentary, but this was the original way to set your brew boiler temperature. Now, what you can do is go in here into the app and go into the settings here. And you can see your coffee boiler temperature. You can set it here. Now, you can choose… We have it in Celsius, but you can choose down here if you wanted to put it into Fahrenheit as well. But it also has the pre-brewing. You can turn the pre-brewing on if you want to use that. It comes factory set at 1 second. But if you do turn it on, you could come in here, and you can choose anywhere from 1 up to 5 seconds. That's your pre-brewing on. So that's the pump on at full pressure, and then you can of course do a pre-brewing off. And, again, 0 to 5 seconds on that one. And that is the dwell time. So you can set those two parameters. The pump on for 5 seconds that we have for now, pump off for 5 seconds, and then you can run the whole shot, but you can't program the entire shot time. It's just the pre-brewing. Out of the box, this is going to come with about 1-second pre-brewing, and if you're not going to use the app, and that's going to be what you're going to use, but in the app, you can set the pre-brewing. You can turn it on or off as well. Over here in the Zarre, you're going to be able to go in here and program both the pre-infusion, so here's your pre-infusion time. This is the time you want the pump on at full pressure to start filling the group head, and then there's the stop time. And this doesn't mean stop. It actually means the time that you want it to go into a real pre-infusion, a low-pressure mode. And under that here, you can set the power that you want, anywhere from 30% up to 60%. And the last thing that you can set on here is the total shot time, and that includes both of those pre-infusion settings. So whatever you set it on here is going to be the full duration of that shot, and you can save two of those profiles. So the app on the La Marzocco is really simple. You can set the pre-infusion. You can set the auto-standby mode. You can set the number of minutes. Over here, it is a lot more information to look through and a lot more settings that you can actually program. So you can do a wake-up time. You can do a put it into standby.
You can set the temperature for the standby. You can set the time that this is going to turn off, an auto turn off. So there are a lot of parameters that you can set here in this menu. Both of these machines can be used either in the tank mode, which is just for that onboard water reservoir or they can be plumbed in. The water reservoir on the Linea Mini is 2 liters, so it is actually behind the drip tray. So when you want to fill up water, the machine will tell you, and then you can go ahead and just pull that out. You can see it right here. Take the lid off and you can fill it in there. You can't really take it all the way out because there's a water hose back there. Whereas, here on the Zarre, it's just right here behind. Take off this, and then you take off the second one, and you can fill out the water right here. This is a 2.4-liter tank. So it's a little bit larger than the Linea Mini. So like I said, the steam boiler over here is going to be 3.5 liters, which is almost double what you have over here. So steam power is going to be very powerful, and it's also going to last for a long time. You can see on that. Let's set this in here. Neither of these are a cool touch steam wand, so you have the silicone sleeve to move. They're both going to get hot, so you don't want to touch the wand. But you can see you're not really going to have any issues with recovery time, and that just goes to show that the Linea Mini is a home machine but it can also be used in small commercial applications because of its power, because of the size of its components. Whereas the Zarre over here is going to be a home machine. As far as options go on the Zarre, you do have color options. You can do either the walnut which is the dark wood we have on here, or you can do a maple which is a lightwood. Over here on the Linea Mini, this is the standard stainless steel but you can get it in red, black, and white finishes as well. The workflow in the Linea Mini is very simple because it's a semi-automatic machine, so operation is just turning it on. We have the pre-infusion or pre-brewing off right now, so it's going to go straight into the brew. As you can see, I should have ground that one definitely finer, but that's the operation over here. Whereas if you're going to do the manual operation on the Zarre, it is with this dial. You don't have to set it low and then change the pressure throughout. You can go all high at the beginning if you want. But it does allow you, if you want... you could hear the pump pressure. Now it's lower, now it's higher. So that is the workflow over here on the Zarre. That is a quick comparison of the Linea Mini and the El Rocio Zarre.
