Video Overview | Acaia Orion Bean Doser
In high volume environments where prep work is crucial, a tool that saves time and optimizes workflow can make all the difference. For many cafes and roasteries, the Acaia Orion Bean Doser just might be that tool. The Orion is incredibly simple to use, doses green or roasted coffee, and features the same keen accuracy you'd expect from Acaia. To see it in action, watch along as Steve demos the Acaia Orion Bean Doser.
Transcript
Hey, guys. It's Steve with Prima Coffee. Today, we're going to take a look at Acaia's Orion Bean Doser. Now, this is a pretty new and distinct product from Acaia. They're known for making scales, so this is a little bit of a departure from what they're known for. But, as you'll see, it's still pretty much the same technology with a little bit of a twist. It's a pretty striking design. We have this kind of upright unit, we have our scale down at the bottom, we have a hopper up top, and inside here is, kind of, a coil auger that will actually dispense the coffee. The way that this works is pretty simple. You can see here, we have this, like, LED spotter light. I can put a container down underneath it. I can use my dial here to select a preset dose or even change it, if I want. Just give it a tap. Another tap to lock it in, and then tap the bottom button on the face to actually start dosing.
Acaia Orion Bean Doser
Quickly dose roasted or green coffee into containers or bags
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Now, there are a couple of different modes for the Orion and how it doses coffee. We have Precise Mode, where it will try and get as close as possible to the desired dose, within a couple of beans. It has a Fast Mode which is better for larger doses, like 150, 200, or even higher grams. It will get there, basically, as fast as it can, still trying to stay within a couple of beans or a couple of grams of target. And then it also has a green coffee mode, and that's just because green coffee has a different density than roasted coffee, so it takes a little bit of a different kind of algorithm to get good accuracy out of that. Now, you also see I have this dial controller plus two buttons. To turn the Orion on and off, you can just double tap the top button to turn it off, once more to turn it back on.
We have a built-in battery here, and it's about the same life as a Pearl scale, so probably maybe a month or so, depending on how much you use it. Probably, if it's, like, on all the time and you're using it pretty heavily, maybe only a couple of weeks between charges, but that's still a really long time. It has a USB-C port on the back, so pretty common charging uplink, and it comes with its own wall charger, so you can actually keep it plugged in at all times, if you like. Now, probably, the biggest question you might have is who is this for? We see it as mostly a production item. It would be a really great help for baristas who have to prep a whole lot of doses to get their day started or even throughout the day to, kind of, maintain everything. So if you're grinding a lot of doses for espresso or for brewed coffee by the cup and you prepare those doses ahead of time, this is really great.
There's also an Automatic Mode, so if I hold the top button, you can see I can go from manual to auto. There's also just a Set Scale Mode. So if I set it into Automatic Mode, I can tell it to start. Let's say I want 30 grams. It will tell you went it's ready. You place a cup down. It will dose it, and then it'll beep when it's done. At that point, it will tear again, and you can just set another cup down. So if you have dosing cups or containers or even, you know, your batch brew filters and things, if you'd like to batch those out ahead of time, you can basically fairly quickly go from filling that container, setting it aside, putting in a new one in place, and getting a dose out again. Again, within that sort of fuzz range of a few beans, maybe half-a-gram to a gram. So you can set it into Automatic Mode, which is really great for prep and production.
You could also use it for coffee bagging, like if you wanted to use a bagging funnel, just set that here. Get your dose measured out, pour it directly into the bag, move on to the next one, or even have a few of these set out with different coffees. This hopper holds about 300 grams. There is a larger 2-kilogram hopper available, so you have a little bit of variability in how much coffee you can actually load in, but it's also easy to just take this off, keep filling it up as needed. So that frees your barista up to do a little bit of extra work. So maybe if you're prepping doses, you could also turn around and pull a shot without having to focus intently on dumping beans into a container the entire time. So it allows you to be a little bit more versatile on bar or in your production environment. You could put one of these in your home. It has a little bit more limited use that way, but it also saves you a little bit of time as well.
So if you're getting ready in the morning, you have your hopper full of coffee. You know you want 18 grams, you just push a button and then move over to prepping your espresso machine and rinsing the portafilter, or something like that. It's a really cool tool. It's fairly accurate, in our experience, in either Precise Mode or Fast Mode. We haven't really seen any more than a half-a-gram of divergence from the desired dose, and it does seem to learn as it goes. So if you do consecutive doses, it seems to get a little bit better at hitting that target weight. So a really nice, reliable dosing mechanism. It doesn't have the most broad use cases as just a regular scale might, but it is a really helpful tool to have if you think that you could save some time by letting a machine take care of your dosing responsibilities for you. So that is that. That's the Acaia Orion Bean Doser. Thanks for watching.
