Acaia Scale - The Importance of Precision, Speed, Functionality and Connectivity in Coffee Brewing

I agree, the title looks like the brand's own advertisement but in order to give details about the revolution in my coffee brewing experience after Acaia -which is at home for myself and at some workshops for my friends and followers- I need to choose some descriptive words in a short title and this is the result.

As someone brewing coffee especially with V60 for almost 3 years now - and many other methods for about a year - I think the most important part of coffee brewing is the consistency. Even this looks like a "must" only for coffee shops and specialty coffee centers, it is essential, also as an amateur at home, to get the same cup every time you deal with the same beans and the brewing equipment. Scale is obviously one of the most important parts of this standardization chain. Sensitivity of a 0.1 grams in weighing your coffee amount to be brewed (and to be ground if your grinder has not a scale on itself), is a feature that can evidently help you to create consistent cups of coffee. One other feature, which can easily be ignored, is the response time of the scale. With a simple slow responding kitchen-scale you can easily make %5 mistakes during pourings and lose time while trying to weigh the beans and ground particles of amounts of 1 gram.

Frankly, almost every coffee specified scale on the market can satisfy a sufficient sensitivity level and accuracy. For the speed, although most of these scales can supply a satisfactory result, Acaia seems to be the Bugatti Veyron of the brewing world. 

However, this speed issue can not be the only key feature behind Acaia's distinguished place in coffee scales. I think, it is its connectivity features based on Bluetooth what makes Acaia really different. This way you can easily connect to your scale with an application on your smart phone or tablet. I can hear the question that arises in your mind: "Who may need to connect a coffee scale to a smart device?". At first sight, I thought the same but I decided to get one and try to use all its features. 

Then there came the interesting part for me. As I spent time with an application called "Brew Master", which is an additional one to the basic Acaia Scale application, I learned that there is a way to control the flow rate too. Even if the recipes for coffee brewing methods mention the instants for starting to pour, they generally do not care when to stop pouring - which can give you an average flow rate actually. Besides even you know when to start and stop, you can not know whether you pour consistently or not by just watching your scale's display in real time. This can only be observed as a post-processing activity which may be achieved by a recorded data. The Brew Master applications let you do this and it creates a whole record for your brewing, which you can see the slopes and curves created from your pouring rate. (Please do not care about my average flow rate in the photo, since I stir in the bloom and tap the V60 in this example, resulting in a big change in the scale's data. But I can use the slopes shown in the graph easily.) With all my experience, I can say that fixing all the other variables, I could create completely different brews with different pouring rates. Thus, with the fast responding and Bluetooth interfaced Acaia, you can play with the pouring rates by analyzing your data and decide on the best one on your own taste. Plus, with this application you can take notes on your brews including many variables such as temperature and grind size. There is also a social network between users where you can share and learn about all the other user's brews. 

Bluetooth connectivity has two more advantages for me: The scale is available to be updated with a new firmware over internet - including the functions of two keys on minimal design of Acaia. This can be a very crucial feature since user's may need different functions as time passes. I should confess that this can be a very specific feature, but if you are demonstrating brew ratios and timings to an audience - maybe during workshops as you can see in the photo - you can make it easily by connecting the scale to an i-PAD. This way you can reach to more people.

I need to mention that there is also a black model for the Acaia Pearl. (The one you see in my photos is Acaia Pearl White.) Besides, the ultimate scale lately produced by the company is Acaia Lunar, which can even be located on espresso trays with its small footprint and totally water proof design. You can see all other details from here - on their website: http://acaia.co/