Varia AKU PRO Scale

great scale, needs small hack to work with angled portafilter handles

works great it’s small use to weigh portafilter with coffee, but my Gaggia GT portafilter angled handle touches the counter, so I put a small square eraser at the edge of the scal under the handle to raise it and keep the handle from touching the counter - easy fix

Varia AKU PRO

I really like my new scale! I’ve been wanting a new scale that was quick and accurate for some time, and finally pulled the trigger on the Varia. This thing has more options than I will ever need, but the ones I do need, are awesome!

Great features with a few drawbacks

This a beautiful, well built scale with a lot of cool features/functions. My biggest gripe with the scale is cycling through the different modes combined with certain modes not providing basic scale function. As an example I mostly brew espresso or the occasional pour-over. This scale has the SPRO mode for espresso, and FLOW mode for pour-over. These are great in that they automatically compute your brew ratio in real time. Two drawbacks are, for the SPRO mode you have to pre-set your coffee dose in the settings menu, so if you were to change your dose from say 18g to 20g you have to navigate to the menu and change the dose there, instead of during your weigh and brew process, which brings me to my second issue. In the SPRO or FLOW mode, there is no ability to simply weigh your beans prior to grinding. You would have to change the scale mode to one of the standard weighing modes, weigh your beans, then change modes to SPRO or FLOW. Doesn't sound like a big deal except that you have to hold the T button for a second or two to cycle through the modes. You are unable to directly go to a specific mode, and there are 5 modes so it's a bit cumbersome and time consuming. For ease of use I find myself using two scales, one to weigh the beans, and then the AKU Pro for my brew measurement, so I don't have to mess with cycling through the modes. This kind of defeats the purpose of having such a nice (and relatively expensive) scale. If Varia could find a way to incorporate the weighing of the beans into the SPRO and FLOW modes without having to cycle through the modes, this would be a great improvement, making the scale almost perfect.