Despite the fact that I do it every day, I don’t really like grinding coffee. It’s loud, it’s messy, and even though it’s absolutely just as important as whatever brewing ritual I choose to engage in on any particular morning, I find the whole rigmarole a little annoying. Unfortunately for me, a well-measured, freshly ground dose of beans is the difference between something delicious and something that tastes like airplane coffee. So I take my grinding seriously. And I’ve found no better partner for my daily grind than Mazzer’s Philos.
Make no mistake: This is not a normal home coffee grinder. It’s a quasi-commercial piece that looks and feels like something you’d find at a small coffee shop.
Mazzer
Philos Single Dose Flat Burr Coffee Grinder
In this article
What is the Mazzer Philos and how does it work?
The Philos is the first single-dose grinder from the storied, more-than-75-year-old Italian company. For those unfamiliar with high-end coffee grinders, single-dose grinders require you to put in exactly the amount of coffee you intend to use—typically measured by weight (somewhere between 18 and 21 grams for a double shot of espresso). It sounds like extra work, but using a single-dose grinder is actually the best way to keep your coffee fresh, because you can keep all the coffee you haven’t used yet under seal and protected from oxygen that can ruin its flavor.
The Philos is remarkably versatile, capable of grinding for every brewing method you might want to use, which is not always the case. Some higher-end home espresso grinders are calibrated specifically for espresso and produce mediocre results for pour-over or French press. The Philos has 130 settings that make six-micron adjustments, meaning the distance between the burrs moves six microns at a time. (For context, less expensive, mass-market grinders often have adjustment settings that are anywhere from two to five times as large.)
Most of my espresso brewing happened between settings 30 and 36, though online coffee forums are full of users going much finer, and the Philos manual recommends anywhere from 10 to 40. The massive number of settings allows for subtle adjustments to extraction and flavor based on different types of coffee beans, different roasts, and different tastes. And those settings span the entire brewing spectrum, from espresso to cold brew.
How does it compare to other coffee grinders?
When I’ve tested and covered coffee grinders for BA over the years, I generally set a price cap of $400 for what I’d recommend to a typical coffee drinker. That’s because most people will get everything they need from a moderately priced grinder, and you’d need to be particularly intense about your coffee drinking to justify paying three times as much. But those people absolutely exist. And for them, a grinder like the Philos represents a difference in kind, not just degree, from cheap and mid-priced burr grinders.
First, compared to grinders like Fellow’s Opus and Baratza’s Encore ESP, the Philos uses bigger, better burrs. Because of their large surface area, the 64mm flat burr sets can produce a quicker, more even grind, which serves as the base for better flavor extraction. Not everyone will notice a substantial difference, but in several rounds of side-by-side tasting using the same dose of the same beans, I consistently got fuller-bodied, sweeter shots of espresso from the Philos than from the Opus.
The Philos also has that “buy it for life” quality that anything this pricey ought to have. The motor and body are more durable than what you can get in a less expensive grinder. The Philos is a beast of a machine—at 28 pounds, expensive grinder. And in a home kitchen where the grinder only gets used a few times a day, it has the feel of something that will run cleanly for more than a decade.
What I liked
it weighs almost as much as my four-year-old. But for such a big, powerful grinder, it’s shockingly quiet. Think automatic pencil sharpener instead of a wood chipper.
