Video Overview | Acaia Pearl Model S Brewing Scale
The latest addition to Acaia's scale line-up lets you brew like the best! The Pearl S can auto-tare and auto-start a timer, display step-by-step brew guides, and even help you learn to pour better. It also boasts new internal hardware that includes a brighter dot matrix display and a longer-lasting battery with up to 40 hours of operating life. Learn more about the Pearl S and its companion app in this video, as Steve shares a complete overview of this sleek scale from Acaia.
Transcript
Hey y'all, Steve with Prima Coffee. Today we're taking a look at Acaia's newest scale, the Pearl Model S. It's a new brewing scale that they've come out with. It's got a lot of really awesome new features, plus a new display, longer battery life, and even greater capacity. So the Pearl Model S is obviously based on the Pearl brewing scale platform. We have some pretty cool new features that they've rolled in, but I should start by saying that this scale is more or less designed to make manual brewing at home a little bit more accessible for people. So it's not necessarily a scale that's intended for the super nerdy people, although it would be certainly a great pick for them. It's actually, especially with the app, the companion app that's designed to kind of bring more people into the fold and kind of help them learn how to brew mainly by accessing brew recipes that load directly onto the scale.
So we'll get to that in a little bit. And let me tell you first a little bit about the features built into the scale. First off, we have sort of a whole new…even though it looks like Pearl it's a new body, it's new hardware inside. It has a larger capacity at 3 kilograms or 3000 grams. And we obviously have this new display as well. The new sort of dot matrix display allows this scale to show a little bit more information, which is going to be great, especially when you're talking about those brewing recipes and for some of the brewing modes that we have built in. So just to kind of show you the basic brewing modes that are built into the scale, obviously, I just have my weight display in grams. I can also do weight and time so I can start my timer, stop my timer and reset all with the tap of a button. Obviously, we have weight as well there. This next mode is portafilter mode. So I'll just use my phone as a stand-in here. It will take the weight of the portafilter. You can add your weight, take the portafilter away, I go grind, come back. And basically, it's set up to just auto tear for the weight of your portafilter.
The next one is espresso mode. So this will also auto tear. Assuming that you're putting a cup on the scale and then once it detects some flow rate, it will autostart the timer to time your shot for you as well. So that's a cool one. This one is a little bit even more fun. So we have…here, we have time, we have overall grams, and then we also have a flow rate readout. So if I'm brewing and I have a Chemex… I don't have any coffee or anything here, but if I'm pouring, the scale will show me not only the total weight that I've poured, but also my flow rate into the brewing device. And that's really great because, you know, if you're working on a, for example, a long a center pour for V60 or something like that and you want to have a consistent flow rate in to match the flow rate, you know, out of the filter and into your cup or carafe, you can look right on that display and see whether or not you're in the right range. And if you need some practice, the Pearl S, actually, has a practice mode for you.
All this mode does here, as flow rate practice mode, is just show you a little graph and some numbers and you are able to practice your pouring to try and get a consistent flow rate. So it's a nice little visual aid to learning how to brew with a consistent flow out of your kettle. And that's really nice. You know, probably more experienced brewers aren't going to see that quite as useful as those new amateur brewers who are trying to learn the ropes, but, overall, it's a pretty cool tool. And honestly, you may not be quite as good and consistent at pouring as you thought you were. Now, along with the scale, we have a new app, and I'm going to show you a little bit about here. I have it pulled up right now. The main screen is going to show brew recipes. We also have some customization settings, so I can go into that scale and can connect to it via Bluetooth. And when I'm connected to it, I can actually kind of customize the brewing modes that I have set up. So we saw all those modes that we had built in. If I don't want to make espresso, I can just get rid of them. If I don't feel like I want Flowrate Practice Mode either, I can just get rid of it as well. The defaults are always there, but these advanced ones, you can add or remove as you please.
We can also set units in grams and temperature to like Fahrenheit or Celsius, and that's actually for those brewing recipes that we'll get to in a second here. We have an adjustable auto-off timer. We can play with the button sounds and we can even do a hello message. So how about I say, "Hi, Prima Coffee friends." So once I say I'm done, I'm uploading my settings to the scale directly. And there we go, we have our custom welcome message displaying right there on the screen. Now, to look at the brewing recipes, I'm going to select one of the defaults. This is just my daily coffee from Acaia. The beauty of these recipes is that everyone from roasters to, you know, home brewers, anyone can create and share recipes for their favorite coffees for their favorite brewing device. And you can go step by step. You can show your origin, your roast level, gifts and notes about the coffee and then you can actually create the recipe itself by adding steps to the brew guide and saying, okay, here's… You want to prepare your coffee in water, weigh out 18 grams of beans, or grinds, rather, add 40 grams of water and bloom for 20 seconds.
We can take this whole recipe and we can upload it right to the scale. It only takes a few moments to upload that recipe to the scale. And then as I'm actively brewing, I will be able to follow prompts on the scale. So again, this is a fantastic teaching aid. This is this is a superb way to learn brewing or to follow a recipe. Or let's say that you're using, you know, a fresh crop Ethiopian or something from your favorite roaster, you're able to take that roaster's recipe, upload it right to your scale, and brew along as they would right in their cafes. So now that we have our recipe uploaded, we can follow along. To advance through the steps, you either hold the tear button or you can actually tap to sort of skip through the text if you like. So it's asking me to weigh out my coffee. Okay. We've got coffee. Now I can add my water. Let's just say for the sake of a mock brewing, we've… There we go. We've got 40 grams of water. Oh, I just need to wait, and we can have a countdown. And, you know, I can follow along this recipe the whole way through. There's a lot of versatility in how these recipes are created. In terms of blooming, sitting, you can create your own recipes, of course.
And if you, you know, have very particular brewing steps, you can add pretty much all of those to the scale and send these recipes around to your friends to, you know, people who are brewing your coffees, especially if you're a roaster or cafe, you can share these recipes with your customers which could help increase your retail coffee bag sales, or at least incentivize, you know, your customers to try brewing these coffees at home. So really, really interesting in terms of being able to have those recipes and steps displayed right on the scale. That's going to be really helpful for helping, you know, a lot of people learning to brew coffee, and it's really exciting to see that kind of innovation coming out in a brewing scale. So, overall, the new Pearl Model S has a ton of awesome features. They've taken a lot of the feedback and advice that they've heard from their customers and put them into this new scale and create a really high-quality product and we can't wait to see what comes from those brew guides, the brew recipes, and all that sharing that's going to happen. So that is the Acaia Pearl Model S. Thanks for watching.
