Acaia equipment is known all over the coffee world. It’s like an iPhone among scales – minimalism, elegance, quality, precision and user-friendliness. (Android vsiOS fight in 3,2,1..!). This year the American-Taiwanese company released a new machine that took the Best New Product award during the SCA Expo in Seattle. Acaia Orion. A precision coffee dosage tool. Let’s check it out.
First of all, let’s take a look at what the producer himself wants to communicate about the Acaia Orion. These are its main features:
- Weight-based efficiency: The speed of the dose depends on the weight. It’ll dose 225 g in 12 seconds or 20 g in 3 seconds with an error margin of 2-3 beans.
- Automatic mode: Dose multiple containers with automatic taring and no required button pushing.
- Manual control: For the times you want to do it yourself, the Orion allows you to quickly pause or dose those last few beans.
- Intelligent dosing: Based on previous target weights and actual outputs, the Orion will automatically adjust and decrease the margin of error.
- Firmware supported: Like all of our products, the Orion will receive periodic updates to its firmware, which you can execute through our firmware app.
And these are my observations.
The first thing I notice is a characteristic design corresponding with the previous Acaia scales – Pearl and Lunar. Minimalism is playing with modest electronics. The whole machine is finished with elegant, grey matt. Acaia Orion consists of a relatively big scale connected to a tube-like shape dosage system and a 400-gram-capacity hopper that’s mounted – attention, unexpectedly! – at the very top. There is a round, electronic display with two buttons and an external dial. You can program up to three different values to the nearest 0.1 gram.
The paradigm of performance is trivial. The beans are transported from the hopper into the outlet thanks to a spinning spring which I immediately named “The Orion Belt”. The producer says about a special patent that prevents beans from damaging. After setting the required weight The Orion Belt pours out a given handful of beans at once, then slowly adds a few more if needed. The whole process takes pretty short time, just as the producer promises.
Practise
I quickly drew up a test to check out the consistency and precision of Acaia Orion. I set the weight to 20 grams and decided to perform one hundred repeats in a row. I picked some Guatemalan SHBs (Strictly Hard Beans) with an average weight of ~0.2 grams per one bean. These are the deviation results presented in grams:
- mode: 0! – 19% of doses
- median: 0.2 (1 bean)
- biggest negative deviation: 0.3 (1-2 beans)- 3% of doses
- biggest positive deviation: 3 (15 beans)– 1% of doses
- average deviation: +0.37 (~2 beans)
- ten most frequent deviations:
– no deviation – 19%
– 0.2 – 13%
– 0.1 – 9%
– 0.4, 0.5, 0.6 – by 7%
– 0.3 – 6%
– -0.2, -0.1 – by 5%
– 0.7 – 4%
——-
82%
– positive deviations up to 1 gram (less than 5 beans): 57% of doses
– positive deviations above 1 gram (above 5 beans): 9% of doses
– the total amount of negative deviations (0.1-0.3): 13% of doses
As can be seen, the biggest amount of doses were super-precise. The producer says that the error margin is up to 3 beans. This was 81% of total doses. A vast majority.
Good future
The Acaia Orion is not quantum-precise. Those days are still ahead. However, it’s clearly faster and more consistent than a human being. A single 20-gram dosage lasted for maximum four seconds. Doing 100 doses in a row the Orion outruns the humans big time! I’m sure that the new Acaia tool will be a satisfactory solution for a busy environment that requires some fast and precise coffee dosing. Shops, boutiques, showrooms, high-volume coffee stores, big events, expos, etc. Suffice to say, it was successfully utilized during this year’s prestigious Nordic Roaster Forum in Oslo.
Last but not least, which I kept away from you so long on purpose, thisvery tool I tested is “only” a beta version. So the results are pretty promising even at this stage!
The question I ask myself is following. Will our industry, at a time of a constant replacement of slower and less precise humans by faster and more precise machines, be the cruel Oenopion or will it rather allow the sunlight to reach Orion and his future kind? 😉
These are complete deviation results:
