Video Overview | Mahlkonig K30 Air
Mahlkonig took the K30 and made it better. With the addition of an efficient ventelation fan, get a cooler grind and save the finer tastes in your espresso with the K30 Air.
Transcript
In German, Mahlkonig means 'the king of grinders' and products like the K30 Air only serve to reinforce that title. Building off the bones of the K30 Vario, the competition standard espresso grinder, the Air focuses on keeping a consistently cool grinding chamber. Even under pressure your shots require less tweaking, and your product stays consistent. It's a grinder like this that keeps Mahlkonig at the top of the specialty coffee industry.
Mahlkonig K30 Air
The Air features 65 mm flat burrs, stepess grind adjustment, doserless design, and programmable timed dosing.
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- Hey, Steve from Prima Coffee here. Today we're taking a look at the Mahlkonig K30 Air espresso grinder. This probably looks familiar if you're familiar with Mahlkonig's products. This is basically the same as the K30 Vario, which is the standard competition grinder for the United States Barista Championship. It does have a few tweaks that make it a little bit better for your cafe. The main one is this fun little fan on the back. We'll get to that in a little bit.
So like the K30 Vario you've got a 3.3 pound hopper up top. You have 65mm steel flat burrs with stepless adjustment, really easy. Loosen up your knob here, go left or right. Tighten it back down, and your dose is set. We have programmable time dosing for both single shot and double shot. You have a lighted LCD panel here to show you which one you're using, single or double, as well as the time setting. These are also extremely easy to tweak, so if I want to change my time for a double shot here all I have to do is hold the button down for a couple of seconds. Then I can just kind of tweak the little potentiometer knob and set it where I want. Maybe I want 2.3 seconds. They're adjustable to 1/10th of a second. So you can get a lot of control for both your time and your grind. It's really easy to get set up and going and tweak throughout the day.
Now that fan system is fairly unique, because it actually keeps the grinder below 50 degrees Celsius, even during your peak really high volume periods at your cafe. What it does is the fan is almost constantly running, cooling the chamber, especially while the motor is running. It has some new electronics built in to kind of anticipate when the motor's running a lot and maybe the fan needs to run a little bit more, versus in some down time when the fan can kind of chill out and run at a lower speed. The big advantage there is that your grinding chamber doesn't overheat during the day. That means that your shots are pulling more consistent. They're not being affected by temperature, especially a high temperature that might build up in a similar espresso grinder.
That means that you're making fewer adjustments throughout the day. If you get caught in a rush you might need to tweak your espresso, your grinder, your time as the grounds heat up more and more, but with this we're trying to avoid that by basically cooling the system entirely. In our tests we actually pitted the K30 Air against the K30 Vario. We ran them continuously for over a minute, minute and a half. We found that that K30 Air stayed 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the K30 Vario, so that's pretty significant. That's a very big difference, especially when you have that really high volume peak period. So going back, this is a grinder that's meant to dose directly into your portafilter.
Like I said, it's an espresso grinder. So we have a momentary switch back here. You can set your dose single or double, and then just push the button with the portafilter. This is an interruptible switch, which means that my remaining time stops when I stop hitting the switch, which allows me to settle my grounds. Maybe pre-tamp if that's your thing. Then go back and continue. The timer will just run out naturally, and run all the way down. These are great espresso grinders. There's a reason that these are used as a competition standard. With the Air features they really stand out in the category. I mean, you can't do much better than a Mahlkonig these days. So that's a K30 Air by Mahlkonig. Thanks for watching.
