After bringing back the Wilfa brand to the USA with the import of the new and vastly improved Wilfa Performance Coffeemaker, Lardera Coffee Roasters is looking to expand their exclusive and high end offerings in the coffee appliance market. This time it involves a coffee grinder and a pour over kettle.

The Wilfa Uniform Grinder

Americans in various coffee forums for the past two years have been looking wistfully at European-based coffee bloggers and YouTubers talking up a new coffee grinder designed by Tim Wendelboe for Wilfa, the Scandinavian company very similar to Breville. The Wilfa Uniform is very highly regarded and well reviewed in Europe, garnering a lot of fans. Until recently, it was only available in 220V European version, but that is changing soon.

Lardera Coffee is now the exclusive importer in North America of the 110V version of the Wilfa Uniform, coming next spring. CoffeeGeek has a preview model of the new US version and will be giving it the full review process soon.

The Wilfa Uniform is a very interesting take on the coffee grinder concept. From the ground up (no pun intended), the grinder is designed to produce exceptional results for pour over, siphon, and auto drip coffee. It can also do capable espresso, aeropress and press pot grinds. It features large 58mm flat burrs designed for commercial grinders. The Uniform also has a bevy of features that make it stand out in a crowded grinder market. Even its body shape and design is rather unique in the coffee world. The Uniform looks like a sleek black canister on the counter, with just one button up front (nb, this imported model also has Ladera’s branding above the catch cup).

Some of the standout features include:

• It’s a single dose grinder: but can handle as much as the max volume for brewing in the Wilfa Performance (over 100g).
• An auto off feature. The grinder senses when there’s no more coffee left, and shuts off.
• The burrs spin very slow, so as not to heat up the ground coffee (Wendelboe insisted on this).
• Some models (though not the one Ladera is importing) have a coffee scale as the lid to the bean chamber.
• It’s surprisingly heavy for its size (lots of metal inside).
• The grinds chamber is stainless steel to reduce static.
• Very quiet operation; the motor is quiet, and because the central grinding area is several centimeters from the exterior housing, sound from grinding coffee is muted.
• Interior design and mechanics of burr chamber yields very minimal coffee retention between uses.
• Very specific zero point and repeatable grind settings (41 in total).

We are currently testing the Wilfa Uniform and will have a First Look published in mid November early January. Our full review will come out closer to the product’s release date in the USA next spring. When it arrives on market, it will be $299 US dollars. More information can be found at Lardera’s website.

Lardera Smart Electric Kettle

Lardera worked with Timemore, an up-and-coming Chinese manufacturer of higher end specialty coffee items to bring the company’s popular “Fish” kettle to the USA. This is the non bluetooth version of the kettle. Lardera’s version runs at 1350W on 110V power, instead of the 1500W of the European and Asian spec models.

The Smart Electric Kettle is one of the lightest temperature control, gooseneck kettles on the market. It also has a very slim vertical profile. A lot of attention has gone into both the design and shape of the gooseneck pouring arm and the spout cutout at top to give you excellent flow control while pouring, from as slow as 2ml a second up to 30+ml a second speeds for pouring into press pots or for tea. I’ve been using this kettle for a few weeks now, and I really like the pouring action and control. The light weight also is a noticeable boon for pour over “action”.

The base and user interface of the Lardera Smart Electric Kettle are quite unique and different from most other “digital” pour over kettles on the market. The interface is invisible when the machine is off, but power it up, and you see indicators and display numbers. It even reads the active temperature of the kettle water in .1C accurate notes (though you can only set your desired Celsius temperature in full degrees). 

There are three “soft touch” areas on the kettle base. On the left is the “temperature hold” button that when pressed, puts the kettle into a hold temperature for 30 minutes mode. Long press it when the kettle is not operating, and it will set the kettle to full boil: 212F or 100C. On the right is a “play/pause” button for starting or stopping the kettle. 

The third soft touch area is a tactile slider area for changing the temperature, slide to the left and lower the target temperature. Slide to the right to raise it. If you are doing minor adjustments, it’s a easy process. If you are going from 100C to 65C, expect to slide left several times. The kettle can be changed between Fahrenheit and Celsius.

The kettle does not have any kind of timer function. It does have the hold-temperature function you need to activate with every use. As mentioned above, the kettle has an undocumented “instant boil” function as well, achieved by long pressing the hold temperature soft button area. Pressing it instantly changes the target temperature to 100C/212F.

Lardera claims it is the fastest kettle on the market, which we will put to the test. Their numbers may be based on the 1500W 800ml version. The 1350W version Lardera is importing for the 110V market might be a tad slower, but it is all but certain it’s faster than most of the pour over kettles on the market today that run on 1000W or 1200W.

We will be doing a full blog review of the kettle with ratings and recommendations , for publication in late November. The Lardera Smart Electric Kettle is available now, for $149 US dollars.