To make sure the Tally Pro was as useful as I thought it would be, I took it to Diego Espinoza, Retail Sales Director at Compass Coffee in Oaxaca City, Mexico. The company’s coffee shops in the city offer beans from many small producers, and I learned that the recipes and ratios for each type of bean are created by a team of three baristas.
I handed the scale to Espinoza, showed him the stopwatch and scale functions, and noticed how his eyes widened a little when I showed him the coffee-making assistance feature. To start, he pulled out a container of Brújula coffee. Master Beans from producer Eva González in Santa Cruz Acatepec. She began grinding the beans in a Star manual grinderone of his favorites, even though there is a professional-grade electric grinder on the opposite side of the espresso machine.
He pulled a Chemex carafe from a shelf, set the ratio on the Fellow to 1:16, and weighed out 19 grams of ground coffee, at which point the display showed we’d need 304 grams of water.
“It’s very helpful to have the scale and the stopwatch next to each other,” he said, before pausing to note how the stopwatch started with the first drop of water. “Normally, you start the stopwatch and start pouring and there’s always a one- or two-second lag.”
I watched him learn how to do it and by the third batch of coffee he had mastered it completely; the intuition of the scale clearly helped him prepare the coffee.
Together, he and I also figured out how to reverse engineer the machine to brew a specific volume (like your favorite cup), something that could be done with a regular scale and a calculator, but was simplified using Fellow.
“If you have your favorite mug, you can make coffee in it,” Espinosa said. “My girlfriend loves using a huge mug.”
Elegant but functional
Together, we look at how the Tally Pro compares to some of its most prominent competitors. In the Compass Coffee Roaster, they use a Hario scale that combines weight and time on one display, but the functions work completely independently of each other, meaning the timer doesn’t automatically start when you start pouring. Hario’s scale is also much less sensitive.
“You can’t measure a single grain with the Hario. The Fellow can,” Espinosa observed in surprise. However, the Hario or other large kitchen scales cost about a third of that, a ratio that doesn’t play in the Fellow’s favor. At the other end of the spectrum, The pearl of acacia It costs $150 and while it doesn’t do the proportioning function, it does help you pour at a specific speed, also known as “flow rate,” something that people who pour appreciate.
Ultimately, Espinoza and I figured out Fellow’s target audience for the Tally Pro. While something like the Acacia might be better for baristas who make the same set of drinks over and over, he liked the Tally Pro for people like the members of Brújula’s recipe development team.
“They are always adapting. This would save them some time,” she said. “At home, it would be good for someone who likes to have friends over and make different cup sizes of different coffees. It could also be great for people with coffee subscriptions, who always get different types of beans.”
“If you always drink the same coffee from the same recipe, you don’t need this. It’s too much information,” Espinoza said. “This is for coffee explorers.”
On top of that, I really admired its wonderfully solid build. Although it could be described as the lovechild of a record player crossed with a Roomba, it somehow remains quite attractive, simple and unobtrusive. The readout doesn’t wobble like lesser scales sometimes do. We both really liked the ratio calculator, something that will always come in handy. Plus, the more you use it, the more impressive and useful the intuitiveness becomes. With its scale and timer integration combined with a very simplified interface, it’s always ready for the next step, meaning that making great coffee becomes quicker and easier.
I asked Espinoza if he would buy it for himself, and that seemed to depend on how much extra cash he could have on hand at some theoretical date in the future.
“However,” he replied, “it would be a great gift for me.”