Review: Mazzer Philos Coffee Grinder

Viewed from the side, the Mazzer Philos coffee grinder looks a little bit like a laser blaster made for the hands of a giant. Its 400-watt motor purrs like a clothes dryer when I flip the switch. It is elegant in its way, maybe even handsome. But it's also daunting, lightly industrial, and the size of a small dog. It announces seriousness. Its $1,500 price tag announces similar seriousness.

But this is fitting. The Mazzer Philos is, in fact, quite serious.

If ever you needed proof that a grinder is just as important as your espresso machine, what you do is this: Use the Philos to grind coffee for pretty much any espresso machine. Your cup of coffee will still come out so full-bodied and syrupy you'd swear it was fed by Willy Wonka's chocolate river. This Philos is responsible for some of the most delicate and full-bodied cups of espresso I’ve made at home in the past year, coaxing lovely sweetness from lighter-roast beans better known for bracing acidity.

The Philos is a precise and thoughtfully designed device, part of a new wave of coffee grinders that’s been blurring the lines between home espresso and commercial equipment meant for a high-volume café. Despite its size—it weighs 28 pounds and is more than a foot long—I’ll have a very hard time dislodging this grinder from my counter.

After a month of testing, the Philos has made a firm argument for coffee grinders that cost as much as an entry-level ebike, especially if you love light- and medium-roast espresso. The Philos only really justifies its price if you're an espresso lover. But it also offers a smart feature that beggars most other grinders: nearly zero-retention grinding. I’ll dig in deeper on that later.

A Commercial Café Grinder at Home

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Mazzer is an old name in coffee grinders, known for precision and tanklike durability ever since its first Super Jolly grinder rolled off the production line 50 years ago. For ages, I have looked longingly at the whirring Mazzer coffee grinders that line the counters of seemingly half the third-wave espresso cafés I visit.

But until recently, you wouldn’t see a Mazzer in anyone’s home kitchen. Expense aside, the grinders were just too big. The giant bean hoppers on most Mazzer models are attuned to the needs of a high-volume coffee shop, not a highly caffeinated power couple.

The Philos, a flat-burr grinder that went into broad circulation last year, is maybe the first Mazzer grinder truly suited to the home market. Increasingly, Mazzer seems to be marketing to home users as well.

Like many of the home coffee grinders WIRED recommends as our favorites, the Philos is primarily a single-dose coffee grinder. First, you weigh out your beans on a coffee scale. Then you pour the beans into the hopper and grind until the hopper is empty. Philos’ hopper is big enough for about 60 grams of beans, just shy of the volume you’d need for an eight-cup carafe of drip coffee.

Like a lot of high-end grinders these days, the Philos comes with your choice of burrs. Most home grinders in the entry-level price range use conical burrs, essentially a drill-shaped gear that whirs against a metal collar. Philos comes with one of two flat burr designs: rotating, jagged-cut, doughnut-shaped discs whose distance from each other determines the size of the coffee grounds.

Both burr designs on the Philos are proprietary, whether an i189 set that's best for medium to dark roasts, or a newer i200 set designed to pull clarity and sweetness from lighter-roast and more acidic beans. Mine arrived with the latter, which suited me fine: I’ve got a strong recent love for playing around with lighter-roast espresso beans.

Operationally, the Philos can be configured for stepless grinding, but I see little need for it. The Philos has 145 adjustments, each representing a difference of just 6 microns. In practice, espresso will happen between 20 and 40 on the dial. Pour-over and drip start at more like 80. It's easy to reset the zero point of the grinder if you'd like, though I didn't have cause to do this. If you change your mind about which burrs you like, swapping burrs isn’t very time-consuming or difficult, as long as you’ve got a Phillips-head screwdriver.

Despite the Philos' power and the 65-decibel hum of its motor, the sound of coffee grinding itself is comparatively diffuse, perhaps because the device dampens vibration.

Omni via Matthew Korfhage

Omni via Matthew Korfhage

What I didn’t expect was how forgiving this grinder would be with light-to-medium beans, in terms of coaxing out excellent flavors without harsh bitterness, even when I ground finely and pulled very long espresso shots. Particle size analysis with the Difluid Omni showed that on fine espresso settings, the Philos was significantly more precise than grinders in the $200 to $500 range, with fewer fines and pretty much no coarse boulders—as one would, of course, have every right to expect. This gave me blessed room for error, with less risk of harsh off notes.

It’s long been a saw of espresso nerds that grinders matter as much or more than the machine you use to brew the coffee, and so I tested this. I used coffee ground with the Philos to pull shots on machines ranging from Breville’s top-line dual-boiler to a semiautomatic from Ninja and an entry-level De'Longhi. Not only did I achieve syrupy-rich results on the Ninja I’d never seen before on that machine, at least one of the Ninja shots I pulled was among my favorites of recent months.

Clean Slate, Clean Coffee

Perhaps the biggest single selling point of the Philos is its claim to zero retention. Zero retention is, of course, the unreachable dream of a coffee grinder. The idea is that if you put 18 grams of coffee beans into your grinder, the same 18 grams of coffee should be what spills into your grind cup.

In practice, this isn’t usually what happens. The burrs in your coffee grinder are full of little ridges that like to trap coffee grounds before they reach their intended destination. A grinder’s interior might contain multiple gullies and dead ends. Static electricity means that coffee fines can affix themselves anywhere along the route. Depending on your grinder, the beans that end up in your grind cup might include a half-gram or more of stale coffee grounds from the last time you ground coffee beans.

You don’t want this. But to avoid brewing coffee grounds from yesterday’s batch, the usual solution is to grind extra beans and then throw them away. You probably don’t want this, either.

Philos advertises “zero retention” grinding, and the device does a lot to accomplish this. The burrs are oriented vertically, which helps. So do a short chute, vibration dampeners, and a metallic plate that serves to ground the device against static electricity. The device has a little spring-loaded thumper to knock loose any stray burrs into the grind cup. It also comes with a “dose finisher” you can insert into the grind chute to make really, really sure you got all the coffee grounds.

All of these anti-retention measures still didn't add up to zero, but the Philos gets remarkably close. To test this, I opened the device and brushed or shook out all the leftover coffee, then weighed the result. On filter coffee, even without the dose finisher, the amount of coffee grounds trapped in the grinder was less than a tenth of a gram—an amount too small to register on my scale.

For finer-ground espresso, I got closer to 0.1 grams, low enough I’m probably not going to taste the difference. Which is to say, I won't feel the need to grind a few beans and then throw the grounds away every time I swap bags or grind sizes. This amounts to lovely convenience.

Caveats and Wrinkles

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But with a grinder whose suggested retail price has crept up to around $1,500—a price that’s inched up slowly after a preorder offer closer to $1,000—one feels at liberty to pick nits where they exist.

I remained truly impressed by the Philos’ espresso performance, and with the i200 burrs, this was especially notable for lighter roasts. But on coarser grinds more suitable for drip and pour-over coffee, the grinder was more likely to throw a few (but not many) coarse boulders into the mix. I got lovely aromatics from some lighter-roast coffees, but results weren’t better than the bracing clarity of flavors I can achieve using the Fellow Ode Gen 2 ($400), which still remains my top pick for drip and pour-over coffee but is not overly suitable for espresso.

The Philos remains a truly excellent all-rounder, one of few grinders that can claim to serve well for both espresso and drip. But it's best for espresso lovers who also happen to like drip coffee, not vice versa. Which is to say it’ll do your pour-overs justice, but if you’re very picky, you might still develop a wandering eye.

I actually quite love the little locking gate beneath the hopper, which you can close so that beans don’t drop into the grinder chute until the grinder’s already running. It’s a thoughtful feature to avoid bean jams that can arise from whole beans lodging in the grinder. This said, I’ve also seen reports online of grinder jams occurring when you forget to shut this gate. I haven’t been able to recreate this problem myself, so this is a mostly theoretical concern.

And last, I guess I wish the Philos’ hopper held just 10 more grams, enough to brew an eight-cup drip coffee carafe without splitting my grind into multiple batches or feeding continuously. But Italy is not a culture that often conceives of the need for a 40-ounce coffee pot, and on a grinder mostly devised for espresso and pour-over nerds, this might be akin to asking a banana to be a pear.

But these are kvetches. Our top-pick grinder for most people, the ingeniously designed Baratza Encore ESP ($200), produces excellent espresso and drip coffee at a seventh of the price. But for lighter and medium roasts especially, the Philos with i200 burrs achieves a fullness of body that's very difficult to achieve south of four figures. You can not only taste the difference, you can see it.

The extremely low retention allows you to switch out, and dial in, individual beans much more easily. In terms of build quality and materials and durable-feeling heft, the Philos far outstrips its less costly competitors. It is a sturdily built, finely tuned beast whose parts are mostly modular and replaceable. In a world filled with plastic, the Philos is mostly devoid of it.

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