To make sure the Tally Pro is as useful as we thought it would be, we took it to Diego Espinoza, store director at Café Brújula in Oaxaca City, Mexico. We learned that their cafe in the city features beans from a number of small producers, with the recipes and ratios for each bean created by a team of three baristas.
I handed Espinosa the scale and showed him how the timer and scale worked, and then I noticed his eyes get a little wider as I showed him the brewing aids. First, he pulled out a container of Burjula Maestro beans from producer Eva Gonzalez in Santa Cruz Acatepec. He started by grinding the beans with his favorite Estrella hand grinder, even though he has a professional electric grinder on the other side of the espresso machine.
He grabbed a Chemex carafe from the shelf, set the Fellow ratio to 1:16, and measured out 19 grams of ground coffee, at which point the screen said he needed 304 grams of water.
“It’s really convenient to have the scale and the timer next to each other,” he said, praising the system that starts the timer on the first drop of water. “Usually when you start the timer and start pouring, there’s always a second or two off.”
I watched him get the hang of it, and by the third cup of coffee he was totally proficient, his intuition with the scale clearly aiding his brewing technique.
He and I worked together to reverse engineer the machine and even come up with a way to brew a specific amount, like your favorite mug, which is something you could do with a regular scale and calculator, but simplified by using Fellow.
“If you have a favorite cup, you can brew it in that,” Espinosa says. “My girlfriend loves to use the big cup.”
Flashy but functional
Together we compared Tally Pro to other well-known competitors. At Café Brújulas roastery we use a Hario scale that combines weight and time on one screen, but the functions work completely independently so the timer doesn’t start automatically when you start pouring. The Hario scale is also much less sensitive.
“The Hario can’t measure every single bean, but the Ferro can,” Espinosa points out with surprise. But the Hario and other good kitchen scales cost about a third as much, and the ratio works out against the Ferro. Meanwhile, the $150 Acacia Pearl can’t measure ratios, but it can pour at a specific speed, or “flow rate,” a nice feature for drip-coffee drinkers.
Finally, Espinoza and I narrowed down the demographic that Fellow should target with Tally Pro: While something like Acacia might work well for baristas who make the same drinks over and over, he thought Tally Pro would be a better fit for people like the members of Brújula’s recipe development team.
“They’re always making adjustments, and this is a time saver,” he said. “At home, it’s good for people who like to have friends over and make different coffees in different cup sizes. It could also be great for people who have coffee subscriptions where they’re always getting different kinds of beans.”
“If you always drink the same coffee with the same recipe, you don’t need this. It’s too much information,” Espinoza says. “This is for coffee explorers.”
Not only that, we were really impressed with its excellent and sturdy build. It may be a labor of love that crosses a record player with a Roomba, but it still looks simple and unassuming. The display is free of the wobble that is common with lower quality scales. We both really liked the ratio calculator, which is always useful. Plus, the more you use it, the more impressive and useful its intuitiveness becomes. The scale and timer integration combined with a super simple interface means you’re always ready to move on to the next step, making brewing a great cup of coffee that much faster and easier.
I asked Espinosa if he would buy it himself, but it seemed to depend on how much spare cash he had on hand at some theoretical date in the future.
“But,” he countered, “it would be a wonderful gift for me.”
