Review: Wilfa Uniform

I'm not a motorcycle guy, but I love the sound of an idling Ducati, somehow smooth with a ferocious rattling undertone. Amazingly, when I fired up a new coffee grinder, that was the sound I heard. Hearing it while looking at the beautiful espresso machine that I had on loan, I imagined myself running a tiny café in the Italian Alps, a SuperSport purring away out front on the cobblestones. This was the Wilfa Uniform grinder, a surprisingly good-looking thing, considering it's essentially a matte-black cylinder.

The Uniform is a high-end product for home baristas, touting itself as a grinder for filter coffee: Chemex, drip, Aeropress, and pour-over. It’s not conceived for espresso but is capable of making it, an idea that made me wonder if it was the sort of rare bird that could do it all.

Before diving into testing, let's start with some vitals. Most notably, this is a flat-burr grinder, as opposed to the conical-burr grinders that are much more common in home kitchens. Conical burrs look like a cone snuggled up under a ring, where gravity does the work, and grounds emerge through a gap in the bottom. Flat burrs are more like burger buns where beans come down through the top half and grind out through the sides. Typically, flat-burr grinders create a more consistent grind size, which sounds great, but I'd learn that there is little consensus among baristas on whether that's a good thing. Versions of the Uniform have been kicking around Europe for a few years, but it's new to the US market and sells for $300 through Lardera Coffee Roasters.

Photograph: Lardera/Adagio Teas

While you could put a fair amount of beans in the Uniform’s hopper, it's designed to be a “single-dose” grinder, meaning you weigh out just the beans for the coffee you're about to make, then grind. This is what I've been doing at home for years, a short step that's completely worth it. More exciting, you can pour the beans in, press start, and walk away, because (to borrow a word usage from a favorite cookbook)—fanfare!—it has an auto-off function.

Since I had a beautiful Diletta Mio espresso machine on loan from the good people at Seattle Coffee Gear—thanks SCG!—I started with espresso. There's a 40-step range of grind sizes on the Uniform, and the company recommends slots three through seven for espresso. My first go left me near-powdery grounds that were too fine to let water pass through: a ghost shot! I dialed back two steps and—boop—had drinkable espresso. I took advantage of the Diletta's consistency, which I could essentially treat as a pegged variable, and went around the horn a bit, taking advantage of Seattle's coffee scene, pulling shots with Caffe Vita Organic French Roast, along with Herkimer Espresso Roast, and, um, bulk-bin decaf from the grocery store. I drank a lot of espresso in the course of a month and twice pulled pretty perfect shots. Everything else was good to very good, especially after having a little time to dial things in.

The catch was math. Here’s a one-paragraph explanation: Many grinders made for brewing espresso have hundreds of grind-size options, where something like the Uniform or a Baratza Encore has a more modest 40. A classic espresso-making recipe is a one-to-two ratio, so if you grind 18 grams of beans, you should be able to pull a 36-gram shot in about 25 to 30 seconds. Lacking that fine adjustment, this wasn't always possible with the Uniform. But by adjusting the amount of beans you start with and keeping the ratio, say 15 grams of beans and stopping the shot at 30 grams, I could get it to work in the right amount of time. It was a bit of a pain but kinda fun to figure out.

From there, I went to the Seattle lab of WIRED friends Sam Schroeder, co-owner of Olympia Coffee Roasting Company, and Reyna Callejo, Olympia’s director of training and innovation. I had hopes that this was a machine that could do it all, and boy were those hopes dashed fast.

Espresso testing was over almost as soon as it started. I kept mum on my findings, wanting to see what they came up with, and they ran into the same problem I did. Using their Big Truck Organic blend, grind size five was far too fine, and the coarser seven poured way too fast.

“Two steps make a 25-second difference,” Reyna noted, perhaps sensing trouble. “That's a lot!”

Step six was the only option from there, and the shot Reyna pulled poured too fast, meaning it was under-extracted, at which point Espresso testing was complete.

“We give people a weight of beans and say ‘adjust your grind,’” explained Sam. "You can't do that with this machine."

"But wait," I blubbered. "You can change the weight of the beans and adjust the shot size."

"That's a lot of math for your morning," countered Sam, and the more I thought about it the more I agreed. We want to choose the size of the coffee we make at home, not one dictated by our grinder.

Things got better from there. Even as things went sideways with espresso, they noted that it was a normal-retention grinder, meaning if you grind 18 grams of beans, you get close to 18 grams of grounds out of it. Sometimes, particularly with flat-burr grinders where gravity isn't helping, grounds get lost inside the machine or in the grounds bin, which means you're losing money every time you grind. There's even a grinder called the Niche Zero designed to leave (or retain) no grounds in the machine.

Yet for as much fussing as we would have had to do to make espresso, pour-over, which Reyna refers to as “the second hardest kind of coffee to make” was one and done. Wilfa recommends grinding it between steps 14 and 28. Sam ground on step 24 to use with a Kalita Wave dripper, and the coffee came out perfect, measuring 20.36 percent extraction (they like between 18 to 22 percent), and with total dissolved solids (TDS) of 1.40 percent. For French press peeps like yours truly, the grind was plenty coarse, and when I made some at home it was deeply flavored and not too sludgy. Easy peasy.

We didn't make AeroPress or drip in the lab because, as Reyna pointed out, they're much more forgiving methods, and if it can do the far less forgiving pour-over, it'll be fine with those. I will note that I was plenty happy with the AeroPress I made in my kitchen using Uniform-ground beans.

On the other end of the spectrum, we tried to grind for Turkish coffee, set the burrs to step one, and nothing came out, something Wilfa explains away in its literature by saying that if this happens, just set it to a coarser setting.

Photograph: Lardera/Adagio Teas

Stepping back a bit, we all loved the auto stop feature, finding it surprisingly liberating. I pointed out that it takes the Uniform a lot longer to grind the same amount of beans as something like the Encore, which didn't bother Sam and Reyna as much. We definitely loved how quiet it was, especially when contrasted to the Encore.

Sam wasn't a fan of the grounds bin, though. It's a nice metal but was difficult to fully empty and pour from.

“Every time I pour, I spill,” he noted.

We all loved the solid build and the big mechanical clicks between steps as we adjusted the hopper, though Reyna noticed that with coffee being an oily thing, it'd always show smudges on the matte-black finish. "I'd be wiping it clean all the time."

Still, for filter coffee, Reyna called the Uniform “objectively great,” which is pretty fantastic.

Was it an all-rounder in their eyes? Nope. It needed more adjustability on the espresso end, but they were unbothered by this, bringing Sam back to a common refrain among baristas.

“Unless you love the routine,” he said, “don't do espresso at home.”

While it's not the perfect all-around grinder, I still think about those near-perfect shots I pulled on the Diletta Mio. And while I don't like to do math in the morning, I liked the idea of incorporating the Uniform into my daydream where barista Joe pours shots in his café in the Italian alps, a Ducati purring away outside.