OXO Brew 6 Lb. Precision Coffee Scale with Timer, Black

Don’t listen to the negative reviews. I worked as a barista at one of the top coffee programs in the USA. There, we used Acacia chemistry-grade scales that cost $190. Will a $30 scale live up to the quality of one 6x the price? No. Is this a spectacular solution for the home barista? Absolutely. It’s hyper reactive, comes with a timer, and is very precise. If you’re brewing one-two cups of coffee at home a day, precision matters less than brewing 100 cups at a commercial location. Coffee is a living product and degases over time—affecting the extraction. If you’re worried about .1g dose when you’re never truly dialed in, you don’t understand the product enough to know why .1g might matter.

The Oxo Coffee Scale is magnificent accuracy for the money and basic features. It may not offer all the bells and whistles and sensitivity other scales offers (depending on the size of the coffee bean the scale may ignore or pick up added weight of bean), but what it does offer is basic good weighing and timing results. The weight it gives you is remarkably accurate with moving water for pour overs. This scale offers results, accuracy, and timing for people wanting to improve their coffee making without wondering how many coffees they will have to make to not feel like they paid too much.

I love OXO products in general, I have many kitchen tools from them which I think are exceptionally well designed and built. I think highly of them as a brand. Which is why I'm sad to say this scale is total crap. It claims 0.1g accuracy up to the max weight of 3kg/6lb. But the actual weights it reports are totally inconsistent and inaccurate. I can place something weighing ~800g on the scale, remove it, put it back on, and get two different numbers each time, a few whole grams off from each other. 0.1g increments are meaningless if the sensor isn't even consistent to within a whole gram at less than a third of it's max capacity. The sensors are also very "sticky" - I can put a container on the scale, zero it out, and start adding coffee beans to weigh out my dose, and see the display stick to one number even after I've added several gram's of beans. This is the only reason I even want 0.1g increments for coffee, to get more accurate doses. The consistency issues alone ruin the product, it fails at the only thing it needs to succeed at. But the rest of it isn't that great either. The "buttons" are just small pressure sensors under a plastic panel, there is no tactile indication of where they are or any feedback at all after you press them, and they take a weirdly long time to respond (like, press and hold for a full second). Just so disappointing.

Like most OXO products, this is very good. But unlike most OXO products I have, I have a few qualms about this: 1. The battery life isn't very good. I'd say that the set of 4 AAA batteries lasted about 2-3 months; compared to a cheap Chinese kitchen scale that I've had for years, that takes 2 AAAs, and I haven't had to change them yet... Of course, this does a lot more, but I still would like to not have to change them as often. (So I bought some Eneloop AAAs and a Panasonic charger, finally.) 2. The speed at which the display updates is not consistent. One would expect that the timer would update every second, but in fact, sometimes it pauses and then skips numbers to catch up! I'm surprised that this flaw made it out of the design and testing phases at OXO, because any cheap timer from Amazon doesn't have this problem. For these reasons, I think this scale is overpriced. I'm glad I bought a used one and saved almost 50%. Good features are: It looks nice; the silicone protector on top is nice, and the slight lips around the edges prevent things from rolling off, which makes it useful for storing things on while not in use; the display is easy to read; it feels high-quality, like OXO does; it's easy to clean.

Got it as a requested gift, they love it.

Pros: Large weighing area, easy to read, simple to clean, relatively quick to boot, and easy to use interface. Cons: Precision - The scale displays weight down to a tenth of a gram and it appears accurate, but the scale won't update until 0.5 grams have actually been added to the quantity being weighed. The effect is that the effective accuracy is 0.5 grams. Something that is explicitly a coffee scale where you'd like the ability to accurately weigh out single doses under 10 grams, with an advertised precision of 0.1 grams, that's unacceptable. Batteries - The scale takes 4 AAA batteries and these are inadequate. I need to replace them about every 2 months, about 6 times as often as scales from Escali or Greater Goods. I suspect this is because of the decision to extend the display all the way across the weighing area. This just adds a small crosshair at the center of the weighing area, which just gets covered anyway, draining the battery with no real benefit whatsoever.

good

I usually find OXO items to be terrific, both highly functional and elegant. Biggest issue I found with this scale was that the button to change modes (ounces to grams) performed erratically, sometimes needed multiple pushes to change mode. Part of this is I think a design issue; the scale and platform are one unit, so each time you depress a button you also move the platform and whatever is on it, so it's hard to figure out how hard one needs to press. A byproduct of this is that when liquids are sloshing around while being weighed so does the weight reading. I also was not fond of separate readings for grams, one with decimal point and a separate one without, just made the scale harder to read quickly. Alas.

Design is great and the interface is very friendly, but kinda failed its main function. The weight fluctuates constantly and never the same despite the same item is placed on it.

The scale is simple and effective. Very user friendly and not overly complicated with fancy features most people won’t care about. Other reviews I read complained how it is slow to respond when pouring water, but I find it to be quite fast (less than a half-second). Good value for the cost of this product.

As coffee scales go, these are decent! The sales look slick, they include a timer which is brilliant for doing pour overs. They are sensitive and measure 0.1 of a gram, which is great! Accuracy is brilliant, I have a set of Acaia Pearl weighing scales, and the OXO can pretty much keep up with them. Not as quick response time, but not far off. What I don’t like is that my pair arrived with a notable scratches on the surface, and the material that it is made from marks very easy. To me this is silly, as coffee scales get dirty. The silicon rubber mat thing that has to be used is also very hard to clean, when you try to dry it it picks up every bit of fluff from the towel and looks a mess. Overall, a great buy though.

Use these scales for measuring my coffee doses and it does it well. I like the silicon cover, just not sure of its usefulness. When adding beans I sometimes have to remove the container to an updated reading as adding 1 bean at a time doesn’t register as a change. Power on and standby have long enough timeouts. Zeroing/Tare’ing work well too. Haven’t used the timer function as yet. Not comfortable for it to fit under my coffee machine group head.

Arrived quickly. Works really well