A New Approach to Grinding
“The main idea was creating a commercial grinder with ground coffee falling straight from the burrs down into the portafilter.”
Aric Forbing, Technical Product Manager
La Marzocco has always recognized that brewing coffee is the very last step of a process with an incredible number of steps and variables to control and adjust to get the perfect extraction: temperature stability, water flow and pressure consistency, channeling, etc. Every variable affects the final shot and taste in the cup. For years, La Marzocco has put its expertise into improving its machines year over year, until it reached a point where it became clear that this same expertise could be applied to another essential step: coffee grinding. The Swan is La Marzocco’s attempt to bring the same depth of thinking to grinding that the company has long applied to extraction. The main idea, when this project started decades ago, was creating a commercial grinder with ground coffee falling straight from the burrs down. This idea was implemented through the grinder’s physical design.
On the Swan, a belt-drive system keeps the motor separated from the burrs, so that the coffee can fall straight down and so that the motor’s heat is kept away from the grinding chamber. This configuration avoids a long chute, where coffee sticks and clumps up, that would lead to imprecise dosing, clumping and retention, further impacting the quality of the final grind. Moreover, the 83mm conical burrs are also shaped to accomplish each dose in fewer rotations than conventional burr designs, with fewer rotations meaning less friction, and less friction meaning less heat transferred to the coffee. The characteristics that make a well-roasted bean interesting are volatile, so the Swan is designed to leave them as intact as possible.
Designing the Swan
“The Swan needed to feel unmistakably La Marzocco without simply repeating the visual language of our machines.”
Stefano Della Pietra, Product Design & Innovation Manager
With the Swan, for the first time in its history, La Marzocco was creating a grinder entirely conceived, designed, and manufactured in-house. That raised an important question from the very beginning: what should a La Marzocco grinder look like? A grinder sits differently on the bar compared to an espresso machine. It is positioned beside machines from many manufacturers, in cafés with very heterogenous aesthetics and clientele. The challenge was to design an object with a clear identity of its own while still allowing the espresso machine to remain the main, visual centrepiece of the counter. This balance became one of the defining questions of the project.
The Swan needed to feel unmistakably La Marzocco without simply repeating the visual language of the machines. La Marzocco has never relied on a single rigid design language. While many of its products share the design concepts associated with the Linea family, other machines within La Marzocco’s history have taken very different approaches. What connects them is not one specific shape, but a consistency in materials, proportions, finishes, and build quality.This realization became the starting point for the Swan. La Marzocco was entering the high-end grinder category with a product built around advanced engineering and a novel grinding architecture.
This meant creating something immediately recognizable. The swan uses the same materials found throughout high-end products, such as stainless steel and aircraft-grade aluminium. These materials are known for their reliability and add a premium touch that helps create an instant visual connection to the rest of the La Marzocco ecosystem. But beyond that familiarity, the grinder needed its own presence. For this reason, the design team intentionally chose a form that stood apart from what existed in the grinder market. The design needed to communicate that sense of technology and performance before the grinder was even used.
That led the team toward sharper lines, stronger edges, and a bolder silhouette. These choices naturally create a more “polarized” object, one that people react to immediately, whether positively or critically. But that was never something the team wanted to avoid. The Swan was designed to be recognizable from the first glance: a grinder with its own identity, its own physical presence, and a form that reflects the level of engineering inside it.
The technology behind the beauty
“When coffee isn’t being retained inside the grinder between shots, what ends up in the portafilter is a truer reflection of the setting the barista chose.”
Enrico Wurm, Technical Product Manager
Many technological innovations are packed into the Swan, with the sole objectives of streamlining the workflow and guaranteeing consistency throughout the busiest café environment. To do so, the Swan rethinks two aspects of the grinding process. During grinding, burr speed usually varies depending on how much resistance the coffee creates. Variables such as denser beans, beans humidity, and grind settings, can push back against the motor in ways that affect how fast the burrs spin. Since particle size is directly related to burr speed, this variation quietly reduces consistency from shot to shot. The Swan’s precise motor control system keeps burr speed fixed, regardless of what the coffee is doing, and regardless of the resistance, removing one more source of variation from the equation. The second aspect is dosing. Rather than running a timer and treating the result as close enough, the Swan uses dose-by-revolution technology, so it measures a dose by counting exact burr revolutions. The dose is now tied to a precise mechanical quantity rather than an estimate of how much coffee has been grinded in a set time, which means less adjustment needed over the course of a service, and no need for extra scales. Instead of using a physical switch to detect when the portafilter is in place, the Swan can use the electrical conductivity of the portafilter itself to begin grinding. This makes for a simpler mechanism with zero moving parts, reducing the chance of failure due to wear.
The R&D team studied how to reduce retention as much as possible. By implementing patented anti-static technology, the Swan is able to electrically neutralize the static charge as the coffee exits the burrs, allowing it to fall directly into the portafilter without clumping or sticking. This system ensures that any changes to the grind size are immediately reflected in the next shot, without the need to purge any coffee. When coffee isn’t being retained inside the grinder between shots, what ends up in the portafilter is a truer reflection of the setting the barista chose.
The problems the Swan solves, such as static buildup, inconsistent burr speed, imprecise dosing and heat accumulation, are real ones that baristas deal with every day. The Swan handles them in the background, quietly grinding consistent, clump-free doses for them, over and over again.
