Brewing espresso at home is an art and a science. Using a scale for home espresso is essential for consistency and precision, which leads to a better understanding of your own preferences! But of course, if you’re reading a blog about the Artisan Barista scale, surely you’re already acquainted with the need for a scale in your ‘spro workflow. If you’re on the fence about using a scale at all in your espresso, please read THIS BLOG by our Head of Coffee, Phil, to convince you why it’s one of the best investments you’ll make into your home espresso set-up!
Review: The Artisan Barista Scales - Flexibility and durability
The Artisan Barista scales are a great option for any coffee situation. With a wide design and robust build, they will help you achieve your coffee goals.
Built to last with a compact form factor
The Artisan Barista scales are constructed from aluminum PFA and feature an IPX5 water-resistance rating, making it robust and built to last.
Scale for every occasion
The Artisan Barista scales have a wide set build for all your coffee cup needs. It’s water resistant and comes with a perfectly fitted silicone cover so you won’t get any interference from temperature or scratch up the scale surface.
The Artisan Barista is a great size for your home coffee bar. It’s not too large that it will impede on your work space. The dimensions of 130mm x 160mm x 30mm will easily fit most home espresso machines but as the added benefit of width. You can easily fit 2 cups on it while extracting but may have trouble if the cups are too tall.
This scale is designed perfectly to fit your portafilter on, as the width is perfect for most portafilter handle designs and the non-slip silicone cover protects the scale and prevents the handle from slipping off.
Accuracy and responsiveness
The Artisan Barista scales offer excellent accuracy and responsiveness. The readability is at 0.1, perfect for fine tuning your coffee recipe and dialing in your extraction. With a maximum weight load of up to 2kg, it gives you plenty of leeway for any coffee measurement (you could probably use it for baking, if you wanted…)
The reaction time to weight change is excellent, meaning you won’t have to mentally juggle a delay from the scale when manually brewing.
Key features for a seamless workflow
Although not packed with all the state-of-the-art features you may find in the newest, coolest scales these days, it does have an auto off feature to save your battery when not in use for a while. Because of its simple features, there’s no confusion on what “mode” you need to be in and no accidents in “auto tare” mode you can get with other scales.
Although there is a large display, which is great for quick reference, the function buttons may be a little too close together and increase the risk of accidentally turning it off rather than starting the timer.
Read more about other essential equipment for your home coffee setup.
Final thoughts
The Artisan Barista scales offer excellent value and well-priced at around $80. They could possibly be a little too wide or high depending on how you want to use them, but for general use of weighing coffee and double checking extract weight, they are very much suitable. They may be low on features, but sometimes all you need is accurate coffee weighing, and these scales do it to a "T" (or coffee?).
P&R’s score:
- Price/Value - 9/10
- Form Factor -8 /10
- Features - 7/10
- Overall - 8/10
