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What I didn’t expect was how forgiving this grinder is with light to medium beans, in terms of getting excellent flavors without harsh bitterness, even when I’m grinding fine and pulling very long shots of espresso. Particle size analysis using Difluid Omni It showed that at finer espresso settings, the Veloce was noticeably more precise than $200-$500 grinders, with fewer fines and almost no rough grinds—as one is, of course, entitled to expect. This gave me blessed room for error, while reducing the risk of writing harsh notes.
It’s been a long-standing opinion among espresso nerds that grinders are as important as or more than the machine you use to brew the coffee, so I put this to the test. I’ve used ground coffee with Philos to pull shots on machines ranging from a Breville top-line double boiler to Semi-automatic from Ninja company The De’Longhi for beginners. Not only was I able to achieve richer results on the Ninja than I’ve ever seen on this device, but at least one of the Ninja shots I pulled was among my favorite shots in recent months.
Clean slate, clean coffee
Perhaps the biggest single selling point for Philos is its claim to hold nothing. Maintaining zero is, of course, the unattainable dream of a coffee grinder. The idea is that if you put 18 grams of coffee beans into the grinder, that same 18 grams of coffee should be what spills into the grinding cup.
In practice, this is not what usually happens. The burrs of your coffee grinder are full of tiny burrs that trap coffee grounds before they reach their intended destination. The inside of the grinder may have multiple grooves and dead ends. Static electricity means that coffee grounds can stick anywhere along the way. Depending on your grinder, the beans that end up in the grinding cup may contain half a gram or more of old ground coffee from the last time you ground your beans.
You don’t want this. But to avoid brewing ground coffee from yesterday’s batch, the usual solution is to grind the extra beans and then discard them. You probably don’t want this either.
Philos advertises “zero retention” grinding, and the machine does a lot to make that happen. The ridges are oriented vertically, which helps. So make a short chute, vibration dampers and a metal plate that ground the device against static electricity. The device has a small spring-loaded paddle to drop any stray burrs into the grinding cup. It also comes with a “dose finisher” that you can insert into the grinding chute to make sure you get all the coffee grounds out.
All of these anti-retention measures haven’t reached zero yet, but Velos is remarkably close. To test this, I opened the machine and cleaned or shook out all the coffee grounds, then weighed the result. In filter coffee, even without the dosing finisher, the amount of ground coffee in the grinder was less than a tenth of a gram, too small an amount to register on my scale.