The Mythos One is a household name for speciality coffee baristas and shop owners. It’s proven itself in barista championships, high output environments in busy coffee shops as well as our own Academy and Coffee Shop.

It is a grinder suited for anything with the highest levels of output, seen in locations and climates worldwide. In some places, this can be up to 10kg per day in hot, humid environments and yet the grinder still performs brilliantly without causing a significant amount of wastage.

We love it for its features outlined below, from Ollie and the North Star team’s extensive usage of the Mythos:

Victoria Arduino Mythos 1 Grinder

Grind chamber heating system

The grind chamber of the Mythos is heated to take both the blades and the coffee beans to a roughly equivalent temperature of 35 degrees Celsius. Of course, this fluctuates to a minor degree during use but essentially keeps coffee at a constant temperature range throughout any given day of service.

This is excellent for minimising differences in how coffee beans split during grinding with temperature and humidity changes. What does this mean for baristas and shop owners? Less time and coffee wasted through the day on altering recipes against coffee heating or cooling inside the grinder. If coffee heats or cools in your grinder, it changes your recipe without you having any control of it typically. With the Mythos, you face this problem only to a minimal extent.

Dual ventilating fans

Following on from the above nicely, the Mythos has two fans for ventilating its grind chamber. Having two in a grinder shifts hot air and humidity out of the grinder more effectively than a little passive fan might do. These are active and not only operating when the grinder is dosing. This is excellent for mitigating usual issues seen in grinding, where both humidity and heat get absorbed by the coffee inside the grinder, changing how they split and how they ultimately take on and release water inside the machine during brewing.

Large titanium burrs

The burrs are not only made of one of the hardest metals available – titanium – but they are also extremely large at 75mm in diameter. This gives us two things:
1. Quick dosing times of less than 7 seconds for usual UK double shot weights (typically no more than 19g).
2. Long burr lifespan – usually with a Mythos One alongside non-oily beans like our own light roasts, we see a long lifespan of well over a year to most coffee shops of an output of 10-12kg per week, with burrs often lasting through well into a second year of usage before any harm is seen to sensory quality of brewed espresso. For more info on why this is the case, get in touch about our SCA Brewing courses!

Central dosing

This grinder also conveniently drops coffee right in the middle of your machine’s portafilter, meaning you have the least chance of spilling any and the most chance of gaining evenly distributed ground coffee for a healthy espresso technique. Again, for more on why it is important, head to one of our SCA Brewing or Barista Skills courses for some advanced show & tell 🙂

Portafilter hook

Not necessarily unique, but it will hold onto your group handles (known as portafilters) while you grind into them, freeing your hand up to do something else during time-sensitive workflows. This has the hidden benefit of making all baristas’ dosing ‘techniques’ a little more uniform, which we know is an often overlooked element to coffee quality.

Clump crushing technology

Clumps in espresso doses are caused predominantly by static and humidity (moisture sticking the particles together). Getting rid of them means a fluffy set of ground particles that are not contributing to uneven distribution of ground coffee. If you properly maintain the Mythos One, this is just another good feature it offers baristas to ‘accidentally’ improve anyone’s espresso technique for them, with no effort needed.

Ergonomic dose changes

No fiddling with complex menu software. It’s minimalist with the Mythos One, having only 3 buttons on its front under the simple screen. You have 3 dose options stored in the easiest system we’ve ever seen for adjustments being made. Simply pressing the relevant key to increase or decrease dosing time as preferred is all it takes, and it saves immediately without any button combos or exiting of menus needed.

Low wastage

Necessary wastage (coffee that you cannot save from the grind chamber, despite being efficient and scooping all possible beans out) is down to 22-27g coffee, which is excellent. Due to consistency through the day with recipe performance (due largely to the heating system and ventilating fans) your waste during service is also one of the lowest from the grinders we’ve tested.

Quiet grinding

We forget to mention it sometimes as it only becomes noticeable some of the time. But, the Mythos One is a very quiet grinder during use. The sound it does emit is not quite so instinctively disruptive to conversations nearby, despite it definitely still being obvious and audible. So, a little win on it suiting a range of customer service styles and shop sizes. If your shop is small, it should be considered for this benefit as an essential to keep customer chatter flowing happily in store!

Obvious texture adjustment

Again another that we often overlook in conversation once a good knowledge base is established, but the Mythos simply tells you which direction to turn the grind adjustment dial to gain coarser or finer texture to ground coffee. Simple, but usually grinders just have a numeric scale which correlates to absolutely nothing you already know. The trend is that smaller numbers mean smaller particle sizes, but manufacturers often don’t print this obvious info like Victoria Arduino have done on the Mythos One grinder.

Minimalist, sleek aesthetic

Quite simply, the Mythos looks excellent next to most of the espresso machines we distribute, particularly next to machines like the Linea Classic or Linea PB from La Marzocco. We find it to be almost identical in height to them, creating quite the elegant visual on the bar for customers, hopefully attracting them further to the coffee area.

Summary

So, we can see from the above list that the Mythos is a fantastic choice for espresso usage in any cafe environment. Considering it further as an alternative to other models of course comes with the assessment of your individualised needs compared to those of other cafes and users of espresso equipment. One shop’s ideal grinder may not be another’s, though we are quite confident that the Mythos is an adaptable grinder that can be set up to work with relative ease in most locations. However, if you (like we do) also like to have a show and tell prior to purchasing, you can both see the Mythos One on our Coffee Shop’s bar in white, and use it in a session at the Academy with us, where you can get to grips with it in full use.