Video Overview | Acaia Pearl Digital Brewing Scale

Transcript

Hey there, Steve from Prima Coffee here. Today we're going to take a look at a very exciting product. It's the Pearl Scale from Acaia. Now this is a very sort of advanced brewing scale. It's a digital brewing scale. It's got Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity. It's got a lot of great features built right in. So we're just going to jump right into it.

Acaia Pearl Digital Scale with Bluetooth

Check it out!

With its Bluetooth connectivity, the Pearl connects to the Acaia Coffee App, which is available on iOS and Android mobile platforms

Featured Product

Now the first thing you'll notice is that it has touch-sensitive controls. So the power button and the tare button here are both capacitive touch and when it turns on it just takes a second to turn on it'll go right into brewing mode. It's really a great little device. It's super sensitive. It has a resolution of one-tenth of a gram. It has a response time of about two milliseconds so it's really, really snappy. It's great when you're doing like a pour over brew. You get feedback almost immediately as you're pouring on whereas some scales take a little bit longer they might lag a little bit or jump around. So this is going to be a very smooth and snappy brewing experience. Now it also comes with a couple accessories. Right here is the silicon sort of heat pad. This you can sit on the scale when you're brewing so when you're pouring hot water it's not affecting the read out of the scale. So it's not going to affect the load cell inside with the excessive temperature. You can also flip this upside down so if you have like a port-a-filter you can set the port-a-filter here and this little ridge will hold up the handle so you get a nice level bed.

It also has this USB port on the back. Now it can be powered. It comes with a micro-USB cable. You can plug this in and hook it up to either an AC/DC adapter, or a PC or something any sort of outlet that you might have for the five volt USB power. That is going to affect the accuracy of this scale. It's going to throw it off by about a gram. Acaia says that when you have it plugged in actively to really only rely on the whole gram resolution and not rely on the 10th gram but it has an internal battery that is just superb. It's probably one of the best battery lives of a scale that we've ever seen. When we got our first scale, the battery actually took over four months to fully deplete after a full charge. So that's brewing pretty regularly at least a few times a week. So most of you home-users will get a pretty similar experience we think and on a busy bar or something like that you'll probably get a few days in between charges and that's tremendous. A lot of other scales are going to be chewing through batteries in a much shorter period of time. So this is a great advancement in just brewing scales in general.

Now with the Bluetooth functionality we also have a mobile app. Now the Acaia app is available for both iOS and Android devices. So we just have it up on iPad here and you'll see I have the scale connected now and if I apply weight to the scale you'll see it shows up live and then there's also a brew timer that I can use so I can time and pour, while using the app. It's kind of like a head's up display but there's so much more in this app then just brewing live onto a screen. You don't necessarily need that. You can program in all kinds of profiles. You can save your coffees. You can actually do what are called brewing prints where It like graphs out your brews and there's so much in this app that we're actually going to have to show it in another video completely. Otherwise, it would just take too long. So we'll have that up on the listing as well when that's ready. So I'm just going to go ahead and start a little bit of a brew here to kind of show off what the scale can do. Now again we have a live feed of the weight of the scale. I can tare it out here and it tares out on iPad. I can add my coffee and say, "All right. So I have 18.2 grams," there's a little bit more in here even might be 18.5 and I can go to my, let's say I want to go to the converter and I say, "Well I've got 18.5." I can go to bean and then I can hit the check mark. It will automatically load it in and then based on my ratio it will tell me how much water I need to use to brew.

If I want a different ratio I can say, "I want 16," hit done and there you have it. So I need 296 grams of water and I'm just going to go ahead and start that. That'll be my brew. So I have this up on the remote scale again and I can brew a little bit. I've got my timer going. So it has basically full scale functionality built right into the scale itself but it also has basically this augmented functionality built into whatever device you want to use. So if you want to use it on your phone or whatever you can that available do your brews or if you'd rather not have a second device to rely on you still have a perfectly functional scale with a great battery life, a great response time and a fine enough resolution for even the smallest of brews. Other things that we love about this scale, obviously it's a beautiful scale to look at. It's nice and compact. It kind of looks like an Apple product. It's fairly water resistant. It's a solid plastic surface so even if you spill a little bit of water on top it's not going to be a big deal. It even has a rubber pad on the bottom so it's a non-slip scale. So even if you spill water on your countertop the scales not going to slide around. It's really solid, well built and apart from that again we're going to have another video to cover the features of the app but that is pretty much the Acaia scale at a glance and we'll do a little bit more in-depth later. So thanks for watching.