At SCA this year, acaia launched a new product, the acaia orion.

The Orion Bean Counter is a minimalistic and compact dosing system. In partnership with Khristian Bombeck from Saint Anthony Industries, we've designed a customizable tool for dosing out your coffee.

Designed for roasters for weighing out retail bag portions and cafes for portioning out pourover brews, the system is precise within 0.5 g.

https://acaia.co/blogs/news/acaia-at-sca-expo-2017

Looks like a really handy tool for roasters. I am curious if they will ever have a 5kg hopper option. 2kg hopper is kind of small for most even small scale roasters who are looking to use the machine to weigh out bagged coffee for retail.

Jenn Chen of Acaia told me via Twitter that the scale's capacity is 3kg, so that would need to change first obviously.

In my dreams of the ultimate grinder there is something like the kafatek that can run a dose through with effectively zero retention, with something like the orion integrated in an elegant way above the grind chamber that can drop an accurate dose into the grind chamber. The key difference for me vs something like a Sette would be the ability to continue grinding for a few seconds after grinding the dose to get the last bit of retention out, without grinding further beans which you would in other hopper fed solutions, and also avoid needing to manually weigh out doses per other single dosing solutions. For me its not if, but when a grinder is developed that offers this functionality as a complete solution.

Ps. Considering Acaia's interest in licencing their weighing tech to Baratza for the Sette hopefully this kind of Orion licensing is already being thought of by someone somewhere....

Simon345 wrote:Ps. Considering Acaia's interest in licencing their weighing tech to Baratza for the Sette hopefully this kind of Orion licensing is already being thought of by someone somewhere....

So this is the reason for Acaia's bait-n-switch on their SDK promises (and pulling the existing SDK from the market)? I paid for my Lunar a long time ago and still can't connect it to anything other than a cellphone...

Would you trust Acaia to deliver on any of their promises? I'd wait until it works reliably and vetted by the community.

I seem be the perfect candidate for this device. I sell bags of coffee and individual pour overs at farmers market and soon, an indoor cafe.

But I don't get it? It will weigh up to 15g doses in a second, but takes 5 seconds to weigh 20g. I use 19g doses and can manually pour beans faster than that. And what if I'm serving multiple coffee varieties? Do I need 6 of these? Or just dump and refill the hopper?

For filling my bags, I still need to fill the hopper every bag or two. Whats the difference to just putting my scoop on a scale and pouring manually until the scale reached 12oz? Where is the times savings?

Almico wrote: But I don't get it? It will weigh up to 15g doses in a second, but takes 5 seconds to weigh 20g. I use 19g doses and can manually pour beans faster than that. And what if I'm serving multiple coffee varieties? Do I need 6 of these? Or just dump and refill the hopper?

For filling my bags, I still need to fill the hopper every bag or two. Whats the difference to just putting my scoop on a scale and pouring manually until the scale reached 12oz? Where is the times savings?

I had the exact same reflexion yesterday when i saw it! They said you save 50% of your time but according to my calculation this is the opposite, it will take twice the time to fill my 12oz bags because it is slow and because the hopper is too small (2kg) and i will need to refill it as i fill my bags.

Firstly, that's a prototype And I assume by the time it ships it will work better. I would assume if you're using it to measure pounds of coffee for sale on the spot the workflow would be to, put the coffee in the hopper, set the weight, press go, collect the money and anything else related to the sale and then package the coffee. So while it might not be faster than if you're doing it manually, it does it while you're doing something else. Having spent quite some time discussing the mechanics of it with Rex and the person in charge of making it work, I'm expecting it will likely be better when it ships, probably quite a bit better.

Ira

I had heard about this and was really expecting it to have like a stack of containers to draw from, automatically fill, and move off to the side.

Seems kinda stupid if you just need to switch out each container anyway.

Séb wrote:I had the exact same reflexion yesterday when i saw it! They said you save 50% of your time but according to my calculation this is the opposite, it will take twice the time to fill my 12oz bags because it is slow and because the hopper is too small (2kg) and i will need to refill it as i fill my bags.

This would be nice if you had 2 or 3 next to each other and if each one had a 10kg hopper instead of a tiny 2kg hopper. You could essentially have 1 guy bagging up a lot of coffee at once then another sealing.

I don't think this will see much use on bars especially not for pour overs. Maybe batch brew? I think the more relevant use for this will be roasters!

I just looked at the website again. They claim it was developed by them with A St. Anthony. I guess I was surprised to click on the St Anthony link to find a company selling aprons and tampers and not a metered dispensing specialist (e.g. electronic component counters; encapsulation syringes; etc.).

The coffee industry is becoming inundated by brushed aluminum, fancy looking contraptions.

And to think that by far - the things that affect cup quality more than anything else are BUTT UGLY: metering valves (with a solenoid bypass) a-la slayer, springs (a-la KVDW and levers), Fluid-o-tech gear pumps, Gicar/Giemme profiling controls, PID, meticulous burr alignment coupled with paddles and wipers - none of which have a MAG-LITE mimicking brushed aluminum finish....

One might draw the conclusion that If it isn't BUTT UGLY it won't affect what's in the cup...

(BTW - it shouldn't be too difficult to affix the aforementioned contraption on top of a conveyor belt; but I expect the shy Acaia CTO who will not let the SDK out - so forget about being able to integrate the doser into a conveyor. maybe Acaia need replace their silly CTO?).