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Out of the BoxStile Grinder
Rancilio introduced the Stile grinder in 2022 at the Milan Expo. The grinder got its full rollout in North America in 2023, and it is designed as an espresso-primary grinder that can also easily do other brew methods. It is ideally suited for use with the Rancilio Silvia or Silvia Pro X home espresso machines, and is styled to pair with these espresso machines.
Massive, huge kudos to Rancilio for packaging their Stile grinder in environmentally responsible packaging (I should note they also do this with the Rancilio Silvia, the Silvia Pro X and other machines). It is refreshing to see a company use dye-free inks on their plain cardboard boxes, and use cardboard and other environmentally friendly materials in packaging and protecting their products. Rancilio deserves recognition for being one of the few companies to do this. Ceado, take note here.
The Stile comes in a brown cardboard box, and is wrapped with layers of corrugated cardboard and paper. It’s fully assembled, and only requires the removing the the paper outer shell, a plastic wrap, and some tape holding the bin lid and other parts in place. You can have it set up in just a minute or two.
Stile GrinderWalk Through
From top down on the Stile grinder, we start with the hopper and lid. There’s an impressive depth to the engineering involved in both. Starting with the lid, it actually can double as the catch plate for placing under the grinds chute, with two tabs that slot underneath the front of the grinder. Smart stuff (I also like keeping the lid on the hopper at all times (it helps reduce noise a bit), so I wonder if one can buy a second lid from Rancilio to use as a catch plate 24.7?).
The 300g capacity bean hopper is made from high grade clear plastic, is square, and continues the engineering design tricks. It has a bean shut off pull arm on the right side, which also disengages the hopper’s lock into the rest of the machine. With the bean shut off pull recessed, the hopper is tightly secured in the grinder. Pull out the bean shut off tab, and the hopper can now be removed.
The hopper sits easily on any tabletop (many hoppers sort of wobble around if you place them on a countertop). The hopper is designed so it engages a microswitch when inserted into the machine; the motor will only run when this microswitch is pressed.
Grind Adjustment
Moving down the machine, on both sides below the hopper is the grind adjustment dial. The dial is beefy and dense and moves “thickly” but fluidly. It feels very solid and commercial grade.
Technically the Rancilio Stile is a “stepped” grinder, in that each tick on the grind dial registers a click you can hear, but in reality, this is a stepless grinder because you can leave the grind selection anywhere between each clicked area, and it will generally stay put. That said, there are over 80 clicks on the dial, going from choke-your-machine extra fine espresso grind, to a very coarse press pot grind.
Controls
Up front is the deceptively simple (it’s not – it can get complicated) controls for the grinder, all operated via a capacitive touch screen.
The Stile gives you options. This grinder can be operated as
- an automatically timed grinder (with two timer settings for single and double shots);
- a pulse touch grinder that runs as long as you hold the pause button on the screen (to a max of 20 seconds);
- an auto timed grind with pause function (for removing the portafilter and settling the dose before restarting);
- a count-up grinding option that starts at 0 seconds and grinds for up to 20 seconds or until you stop it;
- a portafilter-activated timer grinder that automatically pauses when you remove the portafilter;
- and a manual count-up grinder function also activated via the portafilter insertion.
Phew. Maybe a video will help.
One note about the display: it is always on (when the grinder’s power switch is turned on) and the numbers and iconographs are a very bright white. The display will not dim or turn off after a few hours of non use. Something to keep in mind.
Grinds Chute and Portafilter Fork
Up front is the business end of the grinder, where the coffee comes out. It is a chute system and there is a height-adjustable rubberized fork for a portafilter or small dosing cup to rest on. Rancilio is working on a set of accessories for their home espresso lineup, and I’ve been told a dosing cup for the Stile is in the works.
We haven’t had a full look at the chute system yet, as it is behind the touch display panel, but the output of the grinder is static free, fluffy (no clumps) and the retention we tested on the grinder is very minute: less than .3g when the grinder was tested as single dose grinder. So Rancilio is doing something very right with the chute design.
The fork has a catch lip designed to accommodate and hold in place, hands free, a portafilter. Every 58mm portafilter I tried with the grinder fits, including chopped models. 57mm and 54mm portafilters also work, with the exception of the Breville 54mm triple bayonet portafilters, which won’t sit on the forks hands free: you have to hold the portafilter in place.
There is a pulse-activation button below the chute on the Stile’s vertical back plate. This is a tactile, mechanical button that is electronically enabled (or disabled), depending on which timing mode you’ve set up on the control panel. Activating the button works with almost every portafilter I’ve tried, except for Lelit’s fancy wraparound spout portafilters, and the 54mm triple bayonet Breville portafilters.
I have one other observation about the portafilter fork and the hook system.
The fork itself is covered with a rubberized “sticky” kind of material that really holds the portafilters in place, even chopped ones. It’s so effective, that you don’t even have to fully “hook” the portafilter basket in order for everything to stay secure and in place. Look at this photo: the filter basket is actually resting on the tip of the hook; it isn’t “captured” by the hook, yet it all stays in place under operation, without falling out.
It’s just an example of excellent design.
The Base
The base of the grinder is compact but sits sure on the counter. The hopper lid is designed to use as a grinds catch plate, and the main on-off button for the machine is on the right side, towards the front. The cord feeds from directly underneath the grinder, and you can direct it out the back, or the sides. The feet have lots of grip; the grinder doesn’t slide around.
The Motor and Burrs
The Stile uses the latest generation of Fiorenzato 58mm bi-modal flat burrs (there’s some false information out there that the grinder has Mazzer burrs; they are Fiorenzato). We will have more information in the Full Review for this grinder, but our initial testing show these burrs are well suited for any kind of grinding you want the Stile to do. They produce a very even grind from espresso through to Chemex grinds, and are very fast.
The motor on the Stile is very impressive. Physically, it’s huge, with the diameter being roughly 2/3rds the grinder’s width and depth. It is a 200W motor, and spins at 1200RPM. It has an auto brake system, meaning the burrs spin down and stop within milliseconds. The torque on the grinder is very impressive: nothing seems to vary the motor speed or ability, even the lightest roasts I’ve thrown at the grinder, with a cold start.
Other First Impressions
Everything feels premium on the Rancilio Stile. The main body is all metal construction, and the plastics in the hopper, lid, and parts of the front panel have a premium feel and look to them. Everything about the grinder looks polished and well finished. Even the base and rubberized feet have a premium feel. When you dial the grind adjustment, it feels… professional.
The grinder only weighs 5.5kg (about 12lb) but given its compact body, it has the impression of weighing a lot more. It is 13.2 cm wide, 18.5cm deep with the portafilter fork and display panel abutment, and sits 31.cm tall (5.2″ x 7.25″ x 12.5″).
This is all really good stuff. Lately I’ve been testing a lot of budget coffee grinders and have gotten kind of used to the plastic-fantastic they all seem to be. The Rancilio Stile by contrast feels like a professional tool, top to bottom. We have the white model, which looks excellent next to a white Rancilio Silvia Pro X.
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First UseStile Grinder
Turn on the grinder you have in your home right now. Listen to the motor. The pitch. The strain when the burrs are chewing through coffee. It most likely has that “consumer device” sound to it, if your grinder is pretty much any model under $500. It’s something we’ve just come to expect in consumer grinders.
Things are different when you turn on a Rancilio Stile grinder. It sounds like a professional, precision instrument. The motor engages immediately, hits its RPM within milliseconds, and sounds like a stable piece of highly engineered, lab quality equipment. Pour some beans in. The grinder barely changes pitch, and only rises up about 7db in noise (66.5db measured without beans, 73db with beans).
That was quite literally my first impression of the Rancilio Stile coffee grinder. A lab-quality precision instrument, with no expense seemingly spared on its noise reduction, its motor, and its gearing system for turning the 58mm flat Fiorenzato burrs. It reminds me of the motor precision in a $2,500 Compak K10 Conic, a grinder I’m very familiar with. But the Stile costs $650, or 1/4 the cost. This alone gives confidence in the machine.
The torque on this grinder is insane. There’s so much, the grinder immediately tries to do a physical shift to the right every time you activate the motor. Just a tiny shift, then it is stable again, but you notice it and recognize the power of that motor. You often read and hear talk about “cold start bad, hot start good” with consumer coffee grinders (a hot start is running the grinder empty, and pouring in beans while the burrs are spinning). This is because their motors and gearing systems may strain too much with a cold start (ie, semi-crushed beans already in between burrs before they spin up).
You do not need to worry about cold starts with the Rancilio Stile. ‘Nuff said on that.
After I ran over 3+kg of stale, old coffee as well as another kg of good coffee through the grinder to season and settle the burrs in (this is very crucial to a new grinder), using that grinding time to get familiar with how the grinder operates and can be adjusted, I moved on to my first actual taste tests for espresso.
As a side note, using that seasoning time to familiarize myself with the grinder was a very good thing. I did some research into the grinder before my first operation, including watching a few influencer videos on Youtube about the Stile. One reviewer covered some aspects of the grinders controls. Another covered different aspects, and contradicted the first reviewer’s instructions. That just left me very confused, especially on how to change the grinder from a count-down, auto timed dose, to a count-down, portafilter-controlled dose.
Eventually I figured it all out during the seasoning stage (and I show the various modes in the video demo displayed in the previous section of this First Look).
Out of the gate, things tasted good. Dialing in is relatively easy, and I found the 0.1 second timer was accurate for delivering within .4g (.2 up, or .2 down) of my target dose once I had that dialed in. Our standard at CoffeeGeek is 18.5g, for a 35 second shot pull time (incl. 10 seconds preinfusion) delivering 45g output. The Stile was able to meet those parameters easily with a timer setting of between 8.2 and 8.6 seconds, with the grind setting set at two ticks finer than “2”, on the right side adjustment dial.
The output is fluffy and even. It all doses centrally into the portafilter, without much back loading of the grinds (back loading means more coffee delivered to the handle side of the portafilter basket, than the opposite side). There is some very minimal clumping, which would benefit from applying a WDT, but I also pulled many shots without WDT (just a single knock down of the bed of coffee via a counter-knock, levelling with my finger, and tamping).
Shots were pulled with our lab standard Breville Dual Boiler, a Breville Bambino Plus, and a Lelit Bianca V3 and I had different results in the chopped portafilters when I did not apply a WDT to the filter basket. The Dual boiler shots would sometimes exhibit those pinhole jets of coffee showing the effects of an uneven bed; I did not see this phenomenon once with the Lelit Bianca chopped PF shot pulls. Which probably speaks more to the Lelit’s shot ability.
I really appreciated the Stile’s overall speed. It is so much faster than both a Mazzer Mini and the previous generation Rancilio Rocky. An 18.5g dose on this grinder delivers in 8.2 seconds. That’s only a few seconds slower than the home-grinder speed champ, the Baratza Sette 270Wi. But unlike the Sette, the Stile is very quiet.
Rancilio did an excellent job with grinder noise muffling on this grinder. It is only 7db louder with beans than it is without beans, and at 67db without beans, it is very quiet indeed.
Longer Term UseStile Grinder
I’m 20kg+ of coffee into the Stile as of this writing, and there’s a lot of things I really like about the grinder. I haven’t done any formal non-espresso testing with the grinder yet, though I have used it to grind for press pot (output is really good), pour over (excellent), and AeroPress (excellent).
I did note that moving from pour over grinds back to espresso grinds wasn’t ideal: I marked my setting for espresso before making the adjustment, but bringing it back to that setting didn’t deliver the same exact grind. It usually required one “dial in” attempt before finding the best grind position again.
I also found I preferred one timer mode over all the other modes available. My favourite is the portafilter-activated, automatic timer mode. The Stile was set to 8.2 seconds for the double shot indicator, and grinding would start automatically when I inserted the portafilter into the grinder’s fork. Midway through the grind, the portafilter is removed, I give it a quick knock down to settle the first half dose, and reinsert it to finish the grind; the timer picks up where it left of, and stops when it gets to zero.
Some other thoughts in this initial look at the Stile:
Speed
The burr speed of the Stile reported online in various sources is all over the map. Some say it’s a 1600RPM grinder; others say it spins at 1200RPM. One vendor website says it’s 1500RPM in their description, but lists 1200RPM in the specs, so go figure. I asked Rancilio directly, and they claim the motor is rated for 1600RPM, but the gearing system maintains it at 1200RPM, both with load and without.
1200 RPM is very fast for a consumer oriented grinder, but still what many consider an acceptable speed for flat burrs. At this speed, some heat is generated in the grinds but not enough to influence taste (according to some of the latest science on the matter). Bear in mind, many professional flat burr Italian espresso grinders spin at 1200-1500RPM, so this is at the lower end.
Flavour Profile on Espresso
If you’ve ever used a traditional high RPM flat burr grinder from Italy, especially by companies that make their own burrsets, you will be very familiar with the flavour profile the Stile provides. I’ve been putting the Stile up against the Ceado Life X (50mm flat blind burrs), as well as a well seasoned Vario+ grinder with the steel 54mm burrs, and if anything, the Stile just slightly beats both out for overall fullness of flavour and representation of the more delicate taste notes in shots pulled with it.
I will say this: If you are a seeker of ultra bright, acidic coffees, you won’t be happy with this grinder. If anything, it slightly mutes high acidity.
If you like full bodied, texture rich, deep and nuanced balance in your espresso that doesn’t favour acidity over sweetness, this is the grinder for you. The Stile certainly does an excellent job of representing our standard test coffee, Social Coffee’s People’s Daily blend.
The 58mm flat burrs started to hit their sweet spot on the Stile after having about 30 pounds of coffee through them. I remember tasting shots a few weeks in, and thinking “there’s potential here”, but I could taste a bit of chalkiness from the finish, which usually indicates a slight imbalance in the distribution of fines vs target grind size.
The shots I pulled this morning, as an example, were noticeably more complete, balanced, with more sweetness on the finish and that chalkiness is gone.
Recently, I had the Stile up against non-competing grinders, like the Fellow Opus, the Baratza Encore ESP, and the Lagom Mini. They don’t really compete with each other based on price point and that those three grinders are conical burr grinders. Both the Encore ESP and Opus delivered more acidity and a sharper finish on espresso shots. The Lagom Mini — a true outlier in conical burr grinders – was a lot closer to the Stile in terms of a balanced espresso shot.
For our Full Review, I will be putting the Rancilio Stile up against the Ceado Life X, the Baratza Vario+ and a DF64 Gen 2 grinder.
Stop the Single Dosing Nonsense
Ever since the Niche Zero brought factory-made single dosing grinders to the mainstream market, everyone and their dog seems to want single dosing. You’ve even got big name manufacturers trying tp play catch up by offering micro-hoppers for their full bag grinders (and they often look ridiculous).
I’m not a single dose grinder super fan. I understand and appreciate some of the benefits of single dose grinders, and love it when they actually work as intended (ie, zero retention between uses). They really suit situations like individual service pour over coffee because they give you the luxury of changing up your coffee for each brew session. For pour over grinds, you rarely need a serious “dialing in” process.
But espresso is a different beast. I do not like changing the coffee I use for each shot pull over a few days. Espresso always needs to be dialed in when you change the beans, so you’re plowing through 35-50g of coffee sometimes when swapping out one blend or single origin for the next.
I prefer to fill a hopper with coffee, dial in the shot pull, and then for the next 2 to 4 days, have a consistent, even experience as that coffee dwindles down in the bean hopper (I know I may have to change the grind size finer half a click by day 3, that’s it).
And to be honest, I’ve got zero issues with purging out a gram or two of coffee between uses from an on-demand grinder that retains some ground coffee between uses. For some reason, there’s a certain cadre of the home coffee enthusiast that bristles at the thought that they might have to purge off a gram or two of coffee.
The Rancilio Stile is not a single dose grinder. It is an on-demand, fill the hopper grinder. And I’m very good with that.
That said (sigh), I did test it as a single dose grinder to see what the retention was like. And it’s pretty good! I based my tests off of using 20g of coffee, ground for espresso. In three cases, I started with a completely cleaned out grinder. In six other tests, I did an additional grind sample after grinding and measuring the initial 20g dose.
In the completely clean start tests, the Stile left an average of .3g inside the machine: 20g in, 19.7g average out.
In my six measurements doing a second (and third) grind sample after the initial clean sample, the retention was less, and in two samples, I actually got more coffee out than I put in. The retention was less than .2g for four of the test runs, and two were actually .1g over my dose (20g in, 20.1g out).
One More Comment on Seasoning
Early reviews for this grinder belie the fact that grinders like the Rancilio Stile need a lot of break in and seasoning before it operates at a consistent level. That’s just a fact. The Fiorenzato burrs are rated for 250-300kg of espresso-ground coffee, and really require about 10-15kg through the grinder before they are fully seasoned and optimal for consistent results.
There are some Amazon reviews for this grinder with low ratings by people who decided to review it after putting their first bag of coffee through the machine. I’d ignore those entirely.
The Stile needs seasoning. Run at least 10kg through the grinder before making judgement on it, and by the time you hit 20kg, it will be fully into its groove. We didn’t even start recorded and documented tests on this grinder until it had at least 7.5kg through the hopper, and our more crucial tests started once we passed 10kg.
Concerns About the Rancilio Stile
My main concern about this grinder, long term, is the touch screen. I always prefer mechanical buttons over electro-mechanical ones, and electro-mechanical buttons over capacitive touch screens.
There have been reports of the touch screen failing. In one example (of several I found online) there was one person in Europe who posted a review of the Stile, and she deleted it later on. When I reached out to her asking why, she said that her grinder stopped working when the touch screen failed. That is concerning, and something you should keep in mind if buying this grinder.
I will be asking Rancilio specifically about the touch screen and how it will stand up to a decade or two of use. I will also find out if the touch screen is easily serviceable or replaceable, and won’t break the bank if you have to do so. I’ve had our test unit’s touch screen removed to poke around inside, and it is mostly a self-contained unit that can be easily replaced by the end user if it comes to that.
(Side note: Rancilio also has a non touch screen variant of the Stile, called the Stile SD).
I do note in the manual that the grinder will pop a warning to “replace grinder” after it has run for 70 total hours (4,200 minutes), which is a bit ominous at first glance. But if you do the math, that is 252,000 seconds, and considering a double dose takes about 8.5 seconds, that is 29,647 double shot doses for espresso before the grinder expects to be replaced. In case you are really wondering, that is 548.5kg of coffee. Or 1,208 pounds of coffee put through the grinder.
Oh. That warning that pops up after 70hr of active motor use? You can reset it when it pops up and ignore it if you want. That said, I’d rather it display a warning for when it is time to replace the burrs based on motor time. They could trigger it at 35 hours.
Lastly, the touch screen and how to jump between different settings is not intuitive. I had to read the manual several times, and watch several demonstration videos just to figure it all out. If Rancilio ever updates the Stile, this is an area I think they should tackle: the UI. Once you figure it out and get used to it, things are fine; it’s just a matter of learning it in the first place.
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ConclusionStile Grinder
I really like this grinder by Rancilio. At the end of the day the Stile is a fantastic espresso grinder, dishing out a very uniform, static free, fluffy grind directly into the middle of a portafilter basket, and it does so are speeds faster than 2g/second. It does it with a powerful, torque-heavy and quiet motor. Use it, and you feel this grinder is just taking care of business without trying to put on much of a show.
Rancilio supposedly is working on a Casa, or Home line of products, which are set to include things like new tampers, knock boxes, tamping mats, WDT tools, and a few goodies for the Stile: a proper dosing cup (that works with the Stile’s portafilter forks) and a new stray grinds tray. In fact, one of the reasons this First Look is so delayed is that I was waiting for official confirmation and public information on these things. But Rancilio’s dragged that out, so no formal announcement yet. A dosing cup that works with the Stile fork will “next level” this grinder a bit, because it does do an excellent brew grind, and it has the range, all the way up to press pot.
There’s not a lot of coverage of this grinder online by independent sources. The scant consumer reviews out there (mostly on Amazon, which I mostly don’t trust), are negative, but my experienced eye says most of those complainants were writing their reviews after getting a pound or two through the grinder and complaining about how the timed dosing was off. Folks: all grinders, but especially burr grinders, need seasoning and breaking in to be consistent. The Stile we had here was off by as much as 1 to 1.5g on doses early on. By the time I had 5kg through the grinder, the timed doses were off by .2g up or down, which is a very acceptable range.
A slightly bigger concern is the display panel. A few consumer reviews talked about the panel failing. A barista / blogger in Europe had a review of the Stile online but she recently deleted it. When I asked her why, she said it was because the display failed and the grinder could not longer operate. That is a big concern, and something I think Rancilio will have to talk about to assuage potential buyers. Parts failures are a fact of life in high end equipment, but as long as the companies can supply replacement parts that are not at extortion rates (I’m looking at you, La Marzocco), that’s acceptable to me.
For over 3 months now, the Stile’s been happily producing grinds to be pulled through the Lelit Bianca. It’s performance is as good, if not better than our lab grinder (Sette 270Wi), the DF64 Gen 2, the Baratza Forte, and and other grinders I use and test for espresso.
Even though this is a First Look, I have a lot of time and about 20-25kg in on the grinder now, and I know if I was just in the market for an espresso primary grinder, the Rancilio Stile would be on my short list.
This grinder currently retails for $650 in the US, and is only available at a few select vendors.
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Mark has certified as a Canadian, USA, and World Barista Championship Judge in both sensory and technical fields, as well as working as an instructor in coffee and espresso training. He started CoffeeGeek in 2001.
One Response
Hi Mark. As usual, an excellent and thorough review! I know you don’t like first looks called reviews, but you cover more about machines in your first looks than most reviewers do for their entire long term reviews and I appreciate that.
I was considering this grinder but then read the amazon reviews (which you reference) which initially turned me off. I recall Lance did a video talking about the need to break in grinders and season them so after reading this today i went back to those reviews and yes they all seem to lodge complaints about dosing and consistency which seems to be your complaint about those reviews – done too early before the grinder has broken in.
Based on your review, I’m ready to pull the trigger on this but I would like to know rancilio’s policy and pricing on replacing that front panel if it does fail. That is a concern. if it’s inexpensive (under $100), that’s an acceptable risk based on all the positives you wrote.