Timemore Sculptor: Endgame Coffee Grinder Review

After two months with the Timemore Sculptor 78SS grinder, I've discovered what might be the only grinder most coffee enthusiasts will ever need. In this episode, I break down my honest experience with this $800 grinder equipped with standard burrs, comparing it against my collection including the legendary EK43, the Fellow Ode Gen 2, and several hand grinders. I share how this grinder completely changed my approach to dialing in coffee through its unique speed control feature and surprisingly usable grind range that spans from espresso to pour-over.

Throughout this review, I discuss the practical realities of owning this grinder—from the fluffy, low-fines coffee grounds it produces to the specific challenges I encountered with espresso extraction. I explain how adjusting RPM speeds essentially gives you multiple grinders in one, and why most of the 18+ grind settings are actually usable compared to other grinders on the market. You'll learn about the grinder's design features including the magnetic catch cup, automatic knocker, and why the hopper size is both a feature and a drawback. By listening to this episode, you'll understand whether the Timemore Sculptor 78SS is the endgame grinder for your home coffee setup, how to approach dialing it in for different brew methods, and why I believe this grinder can grow with you regardless of whether you're brewing light, medium, or dark roasts.

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Two month review on the Timemore Sculptor 78SS, the regular burrs. Didn't want to go with the War of Clarity ones. Could be a story for another day. But I've had this grinder for two months.

[00:00:21]
I've been using it off and on. I have other grinders that I'm using. But the thing about it is that this grinder is interesting.

[00:00:32]
I would say that this grinder is probably the only grinder that you need. If you don't want to play around or fuss around with hand grinders or pick an intermediate grinder like the Fellow Ode Gen 2, for essentially $800 you can have the best grinder that you'll ever have, that you'll ever need, that you can grow into, that you can do all the things that you want to do with coffee.

[00:01:03]
I wanted to talk about the pros and cons of what I witnessed already. But I wanted to get something that for the most part is attainable by most people. I know that you've listened to me or heard me talk about the EK43. I bought that 10 to 12 years ago.

[00:01:24]
That grinder as it is right now is $3,500. It is expensive. It's big. It's not really designed for a home coffee brewer type of person. I actually used to have it on my coffee bar. I probably have pictures of it somewhere. But the thing about it is that it was a type of grinder that I expected a lot from it because of how expensive it was and what it can do for you.

[00:01:55]
The particles were amazing. Did it have some fines? Yeah. But it's one of the few grinders that I was able to actually grind from all the way from the coarsest level, which was the 11 on that one. I can go all the way down to one. It never really went down there.

[00:02:16]
It was very hard to actually dial in espresso if you didn't have the espresso focus burrs. But it was a grinder that, as I talked about, if your coffee doesn't come out amazing on that grinder, it more than likely means that your coffee sucks.

[00:02:36]
I mean, that's not really the case. That's really not true. But when you have that high expectation for something that does something magical, the only limiting factor really is the grinder or the coffee in this case.

[00:02:53]
That's not a grinder that I recommend to most people because one, it's more like a shop grinder. It's very expensive. It's a workhorse. It just chews through coffee. It does a good job. But again, it's not as practical as it may seem.

[00:03:13]
This one right here, the Timemore Sculptor 78SS, is a grinder that I believe most people will want to aspire to, to grow old with. It's a relatively new grinder on the market. It's a couple years. I'm sure it's won a lot of different awards.

[00:03:39]
As I gripe about grinders most of the time, this one really threw me for a big loop. Most of the time whenever I get a grinder, I used to go to the extreme of coarseness and fineness and kind of playing around with it that way. What I've realized over time is that most grinders, they have this sweet spot of actually having usable burr clicks or settings that are most ideal for most coffees.

[00:04:09]
I think French press settings are kind of bullshit. I don't think they do much for you. It gives you a sense of as much as you want. You have all the world at your fingertips. In this case, the dial.

[00:04:30]
Whenever I usually get a grinder, I throw it through the paces. This one was no exception. I didn't really know much about it. I knew about it, but mainly just playing around with the settings. I thought with standard burrs that I would have to go a lot finer with a lot of coffees. That's what I did.

[00:04:52]
I think I started at a 10. It goes up to zero all the way to 18. I started at a 10, so right in the middle. I brewed my cup of coffee. I was like, "Hmm, something about this is off." I didn't really give it that much more time in order for it to actually grind the coffee, get used to the coffee, season the burrs.

[00:05:21]
Then I took a TDS meter because something about it felt a little off, meaning that it was extremely strong, but it wasn't bitter. I knew that I over-extracted it.

[00:05:37]
When I ground the coffee, they were extremely fluffy. Something about a fluffy bed of coffee grounds makes me go insane. That lets me know that there's not many fines in it. It's just ready to be brewed. When I took that TDS meter, I was like, "What the hell is this?" Usually, it's about 1.5. This was like 2.6 or 2.7.

[00:06:10]
I started making another cup, made it coarser, coarser, coarser. Then I found the sweet spot of actually having a good extraction. I believe for this particular coffee, it was about 13, 14. Again, depending on what your palate wants and what you're trying to extract out of it. I'm getting a decent cup.

[00:06:45]
I kept working on it, kept working on it, kept making the different changes in order for me to understand what is the best grind setting for this particular coffee. So about 12. I was like, "Oh, that's pretty good." I still was kind of tripping out because it wasn't what I expected.

[00:07:05]
You have different types of coffees. Some are denser than others. They require finer grinding or coarser grinding. Depending on what you're actually trying to pull out of that coffee, if you're trying to pull something sweet out of it, if you're looking for a good, balanced cup of coffee. I kept playing around with it. Then one day I was reading stuff and I was like, "You know what, this grinder has the different speeds."

[00:07:40]
So you can play around with this. So it goes, I'm going to look at this because I'm not going to lie to you. The manual is right here somewhere. It goes from 400 to 800 RPMs. There are five different settings. I believe it's 400, 500, 600, 700, 800.

[00:08:00]
So I'm like, "Cool, let's try it on the slowest speed," which is right in the middle of the grinder. So then I went from, I believe it's 14, then I went back up to 16 because it was going really slow. So I went up to 16 and I was like, "Let me try this." I went ahead and brewed it. Essentially, I found the sweet spot of this particular coffee at this speed going in. I was like, "What the hell?" This makes it so I'm playing around with more than just one different grinder. So I was like, "Alright, cool."

[00:08:31]
I was wondering when I was going to get down to those finer burr sets. I think the lowest that I've gone is 10 just because I was playing around with fast filters. I could probably get down there to that realm, but it gave me a sense that I had two to three grinders in one.

[00:08:57]
Playing around with the speeds kind of opened up a lot of things. This is a coffee and espresso type of burr set. The next thing I wanted to try was espresso.

[00:09:10]
I have this espresso that I've pretty much done with it for now. This combination is that it's a medium dark, but it presents like a light roast, so sometimes you have to go a lot finer than you normally do. So I did that. And I was like, "Damn, there we go. We finally cracked the disadvantages of this grinder." I kept going finer and finer and finer.

[00:09:36]
I think I started at five. That's where espresso range is. And then kept going, kept going, kept going. Then it got to the point where I was at 1.5, almost getting close to zero. The workable range of the grinder.

[00:09:56]
So then it was fine. My coffees were a little thin. They were still tasty, very clear. I can see the intricacies of what I was tasting. But they were a little thin, which is fine.

[00:10:13]
So then yesterday, as I was thinking more about this, I'm like, "Let me just overdose it a little bit." I use, if you don't know, I use an Olympia Cremina 49 millimeter portafilter. And usually, I can grind to the point where I can pull a decent shot at 14 grams.

[00:10:47]
So one thing that I've noticed with this particular grinder, which you may have to realize too, is that if you're trying to play around with different settings, if you're not trying to go to the finest setting, you're going to have to overdose. So that's what I did. 15 grams, sometimes 15 and a half grams. And I was playing around at, what was it? Two, which is great. It was tasty. It brought up more than what I could get out of this coffee in this particular setting.

[00:11:20]
So what am I saying here? I'm saying that this grinder is magical. It talks to you. It allows you to experience coffee on a level where most of the grind settings are usable. And it's kind of weird because now I'm wondering when will I be able to really use the five to 10 range, because I don't know if you really need to.

[00:11:45]
I don't really do Turkish. Five is just barely kissing the realm of espresso. I've been playing around and using coffees about between 12 to 16 range.

[00:11:59]
So it's a trippy grinder because you can play around with different things. I'm going to do some more tests, play around with different settings. But this grinder teaches you, kind of trains your palate, kind of pushes your palate to really pay attention to your coffee brewing. So you get it?

[00:12:21]
If you're on the fence, if you're wondering if this is all you're going to need, if you don't really care about having 15 different grinders for whatever reason, this is all you will need. It works good for light, medium and dark. You can go ahead and get the different burr sets if you want to go around that way in order to play around with the coffee even more. I'm so glad that I just have the regular burrs because they do a good job. I'm able to taste my coffees and experience it for what it is.

[00:12:52]
And the cool thing too is that it just literally gets out of your way. Most of the things, it has everything built in. It has an automatic little knocker to get out the grounds. It still gets stuck from time to time depending on the coffee. This is one of the coolest little things right here. This is the can, so all the coffee just goes in there. And it has a little X and it's magnetic, so it works really well.

[00:13:31]
You have the dial on the right side to turn it off and on. So let's talk about some of the drawbacks.

[00:13:39]
The dial to turn it off and on, you have to turn it off. Like on the Fellow Ode Gen 2, you don't have to do that. You just put the coffee in and it automatically senses that there's no more coffee coming out the hopper, so it will stop. So you have to turn it off. Big deal, right?

[00:14:01]
To play around with the actual speed of the grinder, you can't see it. The way that my coffee bar is made, I'm not going to keep turning it over to see the dial. But what I have right now is I have a mirror on the other side so then I can easily see the dial of the speeds of the grinder.

[00:14:29]
So that's the way I manipulate or play around or control the different speeds of how fast the grinder is actually spinning. Which again, I think that makes a big difference, especially when it comes to different coffees that can get different profiles out of them. So that's a big drawback if you don't have a way to actually see the speeds that you're actually at.

[00:14:57]
And one of the other biggest drawbacks of the grinder is the hopper. You would think that the hopper is really cool because it's small. You just put in the dose that you need, which is pretty cool. But it has something else on top of it to kind of help out the beans to come down. So then you can only put so much coffee in there. And then if you don't close it with the hopper lid, they just kind of pop everywhere.

[00:15:22]
And the hopper is actually small. It's too small to me. I'll probably go ahead and get the extension when they're not on back order. Other than that, it's a perfect grinder. It really is. It works well. It does all the things that you think that you want to do with it. It can do espresso, but you do have to be mindful of probably more overdosing so you won't get close to the end of the grinder.

[00:15:49]
So that's my thoughts. That's what I'm thinking right now. That's kind of where things are with me, at least right now. It may change in the next couple of months, but I've been really enjoying this grinder. And it's pretty cool that I have this grinder. I have the Fellow Ode Gen 2 right here. I have four hand grinders to kind of throw against this, to kind of figure it out a little bit, seeing the different profiles that I get from it, seeing how this grinder holds up. And of course, the EK43 that's in the back over there because it really works really well.

[00:16:36]
And it's kind of cool to really see where technology has gone. Let me tell you, the EK43 is a really good grinder. A lot of the grinders that I have. And the reason why I have all this is because I review things, I give you my honest, true opinions about things so you can make the most informed decision.

[00:16:47]
You don't need 15 grinders. That's just me. I think that's it for me too. I'm able to brew a cup of coffee the way I want to. I can throw any grind size that I want to, even doing a 12 on the Moccamaster, which it works out really well. A lot of times I have problems brewing a cup of coffee with the Fellow Ode Gen 2 because I have to go really, really fine.

[00:17:18]
This one I don't have to go too crazy fine and still be able to extract the coffee brilliantly. So that's what I got for you. Let me know what you think. If you have any questions, let me know. It works great.

[00:17:32]
The Timemore Sculptor 78SS with standard burrs. I believe that's all you will need. Let me know what you think. If you have any gripes with it, don't like it, things that you do like about it, let's talk about it. Things that you want to know. I'm here. Talk to you later. Bye.