Video Overview | Timemore Chestnut Slim Manual Grinder
The Timemore Chestnut Slim is true to its name—coming in at only 1.5” in diameter—but powerful, boasting super efficient 38mm titanium-coated burrs and a stylish, ergonomic crank arm with which to turn them. Watch this overview to see why the Slim is suitable for travel and home.
Transcript
Hi, I'm Steve with Prima Coffee, and today we're going to take a look at the Timemore Chestnut Slim Manual Grinder. As you can see, it looks like a lot like the NANO. It has that same diamond-cut pattern to give you the grip. It has the same diameter, about an inch and a half across when you take off the handle. But it comes in a slightly larger package. So it's about 2 inches taller. The advantage of that is that you can fit more coffee into the hopper, fit about 25 grams to 30 grams max in here. 30 is pushing it. Whereas, in the NANO, you can only fit about 15 to 20. Despite those differences, it still is built for travel. Given that it is really slim, it can fit in your suitcase quite easily and it comes with this black canvas bag with two compartments. One compartment for the grinder itself and the other for the handle. And since there's a divider between the two of them, you won't scratch up the grinder when you're traveling.
On the inside, we have these 38-millimeter titanium-coated stainless steel burrs. The advantage to that is that you get really efficient and effective grinding. So all the way down to the really fine ranges, you'll find high uniformity. Whereas, in the stainless steel burrs, when you get toward the fine, you see less uniformity but also it's really difficult to grind at that range. So the slim is entirely made of metal except for this black walnut pommel that can be removed. It just has a magnet inside so it snaps on the end there. The body of the grinder is milled from one single piece of aluminum that includes those two struts on the inside. Really cool feature of this is that the struts are recessed really far down so it's a lot easier to pour your beans in. Because it's so small, there's already not a lot of room to get in there, so that is a really nice feature.
So like Timemore's other grinders, the Slim uses the stepped adjustment wheel. So, how this works is you basically turn it all the way down to fine, so to the right, until it hits that zero point. And then from there, you can count the clicks as you go back to find the position of the brew that you want. A really helpful guide has been provided by Timemore in their instruction manual, and it does give you a starting point for grinding for pour-over, grinding for espresso, and grinding for the French press and things that are up there towards that such as the Chemex. We find that it's pretty accurate. It tells you on here that you start espresso around 10 clicks from zero. We find that about 8 to 9 clicks from zero is where you want to do espresso. Now, because it's a stepped adjustment wheel, we had some trouble fine-tuning the grind for the espresso. When we had it on 8 clicks, it was about 45 seconds. And when we had it on 9 clicks, it was about 24 seconds so too slow and then too fast, and there is no 8.5 here. So, this is a great grinder if you want to do those mid-range pour-over and immersion brew like the Clever or the Aeropress and the V60 but maybe not if you want it for espresso unless you're only doing espresso every once in a while and you don't care about getting it really, really precise. So that is the Chestnut Slim from Timemore. It is a sleek design, it feels great to hold, and it has really efficient burrs for a wide range of grinding. You can find it online at primacoffee.com. Thanks for watching.
