Video Overview | Hiroia Jimmy Digital Brewing Scale
Add some flexibility to your workflow with the Hiroia Jimmy Digital Brewing Scale! The Jimmy features a detachable magnetic screen that you can put wherever you please, like eye-level on your espresso machine or off to the side while brewing with a Chemex. This versatile brewing tool also offers four built-in brewing modes, a 2 kg total capacity, an internal rechargeable battery, and a Bluetooth connection to pair up with its companion app! Get to know the Hiroia Jimmy in this video, as Steve shares on this innovative scale.
Transcript
Hey, it's Steve with Prima Coffee. Today, we're taking a look at the Hiroia Jimmy Scale. It is a pretty cool, both espresso and coffee brewing scale with a signature feature that's really unique, it's got a detachable screen. So, what we have in the Jimmy Scale is a 2-kilo brewing scale. It's got a lot of familiar features similar to some other scales on the market, but of course, that detachable screen is a big, kind of, plus in its favor. The fact that the screen communicates to the scale over Bluetooth is big. It also has magnets inside the display itself, which means that you can attach it to other surfaces such as your espresso machine. So, you can have the scale itself on your drip tray with cups prepped for pulling shots. You can have the control panel attached to the face of your espresso machine so you have...you know, it's closer to eye level and you have easy access to those buttons.
Hiroia Jimmy Digital Brewing Scale
Innovative detachable touch display
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So, you can start and stop the timer. You can tare, you can switch the Espresso Brewing Mode, if you like. The control panel itself connects to the scale both magnetically, but it also has a series of little contacts and that is primarily for charging. It does communicate with the scale over Bluetooth. It's running on Bluetooth 4.1, which is pretty up to date, you know, it's pretty fast, it's got a good range, and you can also use that Bluetooth to connect to a companion app, which we'll get to a little bit later. Now, the scale has a 2,000-gram capacity and it has an internal battery that you can charge via micro USB. That battery has a capacity, a service life, essentially, of about 10 to 15 hours, which is a little bit shorter than some of the other scales, and that is just because that Bluetooth is pretty much always on. The screen has to be able to connect to the scale pretty much at all times, so even if you're not using the mobile app, it is still running a Bluetooth radio and that's going to drain the battery a little bit faster than other scales would. But, you still get about a day's life, a full day's life of, you know, cafe use out of it. But if you are using it in a cafe setting, you probably want to charge it every day at the end of the day.
Let's take a look at some of the brew modes that this has built in. Okay. So, our first mode is just a Weighing Mode. Right now, I have it set up in grams, and you can see we have tenth-of-a-gram resolution. I can also change it over to ounces just by double-tapping the Tare button, where I have a little bit more resolution although it does shift as I kind of go up. But, I'll probably be using it in grams most of the time. I'm going to leave it there. All I have to do to switch my next brewing mode is just tap the Power button once, so this is sort of a multi-function button. You just tap it to switch brewing modes. Now that gives me a timer. To start and stop my timer, I hit the Timer button, just one tap, and then a third to reset. Really simple and easy to use. So this mode here is our Pour-Over Brewing Mode, and you can recognize it by the flashing Water Droplet icon. Basically, all that does is automatically starts a timer when it registers flow rate. So, I'll demo that here, I'll just put that little pitcher on, tare my scale, and then as I start pouring, you'll notice that the timer starts on its own. Now, Pour-Over Mode, you will manually stop it and that's probably just to account for, you know, the draining process and that sort of thing, it shouldn't stop a timer because even though you've stopped pouring, maybe you're pausing between pours or maybe you're just waiting for it to drain at the end. So, you do stop the timer manually in this mode, and one more time to reset, and again, you can tare it as well.
Another tap brings us to the static Water Droplet button and this is actually the first of our Espresso Modes. To demonstrate that, I'm going to tare my pitcher, and this mode basically starts and stops the timer based on flow rate. So, pretty handy for kind of measuring the flow of your shots. However, it, of course, doesn't account for the start of your pump, so it may not be the best mode for how you pull your espresso. We have another mode, this is also an Espresso Mode with an auto-tare feature. So it'll automatically tare your weighing device. It will also automatically start a timer and stop based on flow rate. And our third and final Espresso Mode also has an auto-tare, so if I put my pitcher back down, it will automatically start a timer along with that tare. So, that might be a little bit more useful for your style of espresso brewing. It does require you to sort of time putting down the device and having it tare with the start of your pump, but it might be a little bit closer to the total extraction time that you're looking for with your espresso shots. We also have a companion app that goes along with the Jimmy Scale.
You can find it just by searching Hiroia Jimmy. It's available on both IOS and Android. It is a pretty simple app. You connect to the scale via Bluetooth and it has just two main modes right now. So, we have Espresso Mode and Training Mode. Training Mode just goes through some flow rate practice. It's kind of gimmicky but it might actually be helpful if you're still learning how to do pour-over brewing on your own. The Espresso Mode is pretty nice. It'll actually allow you to log espresso brews and right from this app, you can change the brewing mode, as you see right here on the scale display. And it tells you what each one does, so it'll tell you whether or not it auto-tares your pitcher or shot glasses, and how it behaves as, you know, your espresso flows into the cup or pitcher. So, that's pretty nice. It's not the most useful app right now, but it does have some potential to add more features down the line. When we last talked to Hiroia about the app, they had ideas about logging and sharing pour-over brews, and connecting with roasters and that sort of thing, so there's some opportunity there. Probably mostly just sort of a journal of how you use the scale to brew without adding too much additional functionality.
So finally, I'm just going to go through a little bit of a brewing process, just to sort of demo the pour-over function. I'm also going to take the screen off just so I can get a better look at it. I've already shown you how to get into that Pour-Over Brewing Mode. What I'm going to do is just kind of start a little bit of coffee here. I've got 25 grams, a little shy, close enough. So, I'm going to tare it and I'm going to start my brewing. So again, having this screen detached is a really nice feature because I can move it around my workspace as needed. If I have, you know, a pour-over bar or something like that, I could have a few of these scales kind of inset into a countertop or something similar to that, and I can move the screens wherever I need. Again, even on an espresso machine, having that available to be a little bit more heads-up, you know, almost eye level as opposed to down on the drip tray is really nice. You don't really have to worry about getting stuff spilled onto the screen. It is water resistant anyway, but not having to worry about cleaning espresso residue off your scale is pretty nice.
So, really, it's a great feature to have in terms of versatility for a scale. You know, the practical use is probably that you're going to keep it pretty close to the scale, but having the ability to move it where it's more visible, where it's more accessible is pretty nice because, you know, the scale platform itself just needs to be where you're measuring stuff. And the control panel could be wherever you realistically need it to be. So, overall, it's a pretty nice scale with a ton of nice features. Again, it is a little bit unfortunate that that battery life is a little bit lower than some of the competitors on the market, but overall, you still get about a full work day's use out of it with that 10 to 15-hour life. So for a cafe and for a home user, it's going to be a pretty great addition to your brewing set up. Overall, we really like it. It's nice and snappy, really good response time. It's accurate as well as far as we can tell and, you know, again, that detachable screen is just such a cool feature. It's novel for sure, but it's also very useful, so it's definitely not just a gimmick and it's, overall, a pretty good brewing scale. So, that is the Hiroia Jimmy Scale. Thanks for watching.
