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An Acaia Astra remote flow meter and timer atop an espresso machine. Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown.
One of the smallest new products to make big waves at the recent SCA Expo in Chicago was the Acaia Astra, a remote flow meter and timing device that integrates with existing Acaia scales.
[Find DCN’s complete 2024 Expo coverage here.]
Winning the Expo’s Best New Product Award in the Coffee Accessories category, the Astra in its simplest use serves as a small push-button kitchen timer.
However, the device is more fully conceived as an upgrade to Acaia’s information architecture, integrating with each of the company’s existing scales and packing a wealth of updates, features and data logging into a small piece of aftermarket hardware — all with an enhanced full-color display.
Rex Tseng, the co-founder of California-based Acaia, said the device is in large part designed to keep previously purchased Acaia scales — such as the original Kickstarter Acaia Scale or the 2019 version of the Acaia Pearl — from becoming obsolete.
Said Tseng, “What we are really trying to do is expand the lifespan of our products.”
One of the Astra’s primary features is a predictive espresso shot timer, in which two horizontal bars graph out the actual weight of an espresso shot output and the predicted weight should the user stop the shot immediately. For example, if a user is seeking 40 grams of espresso output, the timer might send a flashing warning at 38.2 seconds, indicating the precise time to cut the shot to reach the goal.
A second major feature of the Astra is designed for precision in manual pourover ratios, accounting for water that might be lost through absorption in the filter or coffee bed. The device can work in tandem with two Acaia scale models, the Pearl and the Lunar, to compare total water volume weight to the actual finished brew weight. Flow rates into and out of the cone are measured and displayed in real time.
For both the espresso timer and pourover functions, the Astra serves as a major data-logging upgrade for the existing scales, storing potentially thousands of individual uses, which can be set as quick reference points or downloaded and stored for comparison. The computing offered through the Astra could not be achieved by firmware updates to existing products, Tseng said.
The device is designed for high-end home use or light commercial use in which precision is paramount, or for higher-volume commercial use for training or quality-control purposes, according to the company.
“Imagine you pull 100 shots on your machine — you can do that and just forget about the Astra,” Tseng told DCN. “It will keep saving data, and then at some point in the future you can pull it out and use it.”
A prototype version of the device sat upon a wireless charging base that can be attached to any magnetic surface, such as the case of an espresso machine.
Tseng declined to disclose the estimated price of the Astra, but said the company plans to roll out the final version for sale in the third or fourth quarter of this year.
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Nick Brown Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
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