Equipment – Timemore Chestnut Grinder

One of the best brands in the world when it comes to manual grinders is no one less than… Timemore! They also do a lot of cool coffee brewers ranging from pour-over to siphons.

However, when it comes to manual grinder they are indeed at the top level and that’s something extra, isn’t it? This is an older version of their grinders, but the newer is also a bit smaller but they are great as well!

In this review, I’ll speak about the basics of this product and this product only. I’ll, of course, talk about the negatives, it’s not a perfect grinder, but let’s be honest; is the perfect one out there?

There’s a lot of things I like with this product, one major thing I really appreciate is the adjustments you can do to fix finer or coarser coffee ground. In the bottom of the grinder, there’s a dot system, the bigger the dot the coarser the grind. When you adjust to the size you want, you’ll get a click so you actually know it’s changed to the same size you want. Which gives the same result as before. This is important if you change from time to time, especially if you have your “basic” grind setting that’s your go-to setting and then has to adjust to get the sweetness you desire and so on.

This grinder is very easy to maintain, as you see on the picture there is a brush that is included in the box. I usually shake, hit it kindly in the back and finish cleaning it with the brush. What you can do to keep it in top condition is to grind something called Grindz from Urnex. They look like coffee beans but are a cleaning agent, it’s not toxic at all, it just tastes weird so what you could do is to grind coffee beans later on. Grind 4-8 grindz and then around 10 coffee beans to get it all out, this is just to make the result of your coffee taste purer. I try to do this at least every second month with this grinder.

The size of the coffee chamber is quite big, which is something I both love and hate. It’s really good if I go to a location that I can bring big luggage to. But I would really prefer a smaller one if you boil water in the woods and brew a fresh cup of coffee in nature. So it has its up and downs, especially the top lid which has the lever. A genuine bad thing with this product is that the bottom part of the grinder (the one where the coffee grinds in to) gets loose if you grind. So you have to both hold the top part and the bottom part with one hand. This is actually the only problem I have with this product, otherwise, it’s amazing. One of the best I’ve ever tried.

Let’s go trough numbers in the end of the review. It can grind up to 30 grams of coffee per grind session, the smaller one can grind up to 20 grams of coffee. The amount of grind setting located in the bottom is only 8, that’s the marked amount at least. I know that you can adjust manualy as well, but it’s not important to be honest. It has two ball-bearings, which secures its evenness in its grind.

This is a very good manual grinder, it’s not as portable as you would like, but it does a very good job. It might be pricey, but I don’t think that you’ll buy another one in your life if you just take care of it.