Review: Fellow Tally Pro Precision Scale, Studio Edition

Consistently making good coffee requires quality gear, and two of the most important accoutrements you can own are a scale and a timer. "Regular" kitchen scales and timers are plenty for most people; I drink tons of coffee and own an Oxo scale and timer, and it never dawned on me to want more.

Yet Fellow's slick new Tally Pro combines a scale, timer, and ratio calculator in an intuitive machine that anticipates your every step as you brew. Using it made me wonder if it was time for an upgrade.

Figuring the Ratio

The Tally Pro Precision Studio Edition features three modes, and ratios are the star of the most interesting one. (Confusingly, the "Studio Edition" is also the only edition. Sigh.) Weight mode provides a sensitive, responsive scale, and timer mode puts a timer next to the weight readout. The exciting "brew assist" mode allows you to plug in your desired ratio—anywhere between 1:1 and 1:20—then, as you weigh out your coffee, it simultaneously displays the calculated target weight of water.

Photograph: Amazon

For those who may have paused at the mention of a ratio, it's the recommended weight of beans to water for the type of brewing you're doing. Roasters and baristas create them for people to use like a coffee-brewing map, especially when you're starting with a new brewer or bean. Coffeemaking manuals like Jessica Easto’s Craft Coffee will provide ratios right in their instructions.

For example, if you had a 1:5 ratio and weighed out 5 grams of coffee, it would display a target weight of 25 grams of water. After the grounds are weighed out, tapping the timer button tares the scale and the readout displays a timer that starts as soon as you add water, a lovely feature found on a tiny handful of high-end scales. Between the timer and the target weight, the actual weight of the water you pour is displayed, and the readout turns from a black background to a white one when you've hit the target, a helpful visual cue.

Brewed Balance

For as tricky as that is to explain, the magic of the Tally Pro is in how intuitive it is when pouring your morning cuppa. Everything you need is in one readout, and making coffee just flows. You're not trying to aim your pour-over kettle over the scale with one hand while starting the timer with the other, your eyes flitting back and forth between the two. Here, it's all in one place, making focus easier.

This was hammered home when I made three cups of AeroPress coffee in a row for friends. Making cup after cup is more a barista thing than my thing, yet the scale sped things along, helping me finish quickly.

Photograph: Amazon

To make sure the Tally Pro was as useful as I thought, I brought it to Diego Espinoza, retail director at Café Brújula in Oaxaca City, Mexico. The company's cafés around town feature beans from many small producers, and I learned that recipes and ratios for each type of bean are created by a three-barista team.

I handed the scale to Espinoza, showing him the timer and scale functions, and noted how his eyes widened a bit when I showed him the brew assist function. To start, he pulled out a container of Brújula's Maestros beans from producer Eva Gonzalez in Santa Cruz Acatepec. He began by grinding the beans on an Estrella hand grinder, a favorite of his even though there's a pro-level electric grinder on the opposite side of the espresso machine.

Pulling a Chemex carafe down from a shelf, he set the ratio on the Fellow to 1:16 and weighted out 19 grams of grounds, at which point the screen displayed that we'd want 304 grams of water.

"Having the scale and timer readouts right next to each other is very useful," he noted, before pausing to appreciate how the timer started with the first drop of water. "Normally, you start the timer and start pouring and they're always a second or two off."

I watched him get the hang of it and by the third batch of coffee, he was wholly proficient, the scale's intuitiveness clearly helping him brew.

Together, he and I also figured out how to reverse engineer the machine to brew to a specific volume—like your favorite mug—something you could do with normal scale and a calculator, but was simplified using the Fellow.

"If you have your favorite cup, you can brew to that," noted Espinosa. "My girlfriend loves using a huge cup."

Fancy but Functional

Together, we considered how the Tally Pro compares to some of its notable competition. At Café Brújulas’ roastery, they use a Hario scale that combines the weight and time on one screen, but the features function wholly independent of one another, meaning the timer doesn't start automatically when you begin pouring. The Hario's scale is also far less sensitive.

"With the Hario, you can't measure a single bean. The Fellow can," Espinosa noted with surprise. Yet the Hario or other great kitchen scales cost about a third as much, a ratio that does not work out in the Fellow's favor. On the other end of the spectrum, Acacia's Pearl costs $150 and while it doesn't do the ratio thing, it helps you pour at a specific speed, aka the “flow rate”—something pour-over people appreciate.

Finally, Espinoza and I puzzled out the Fellow target audience for the Tally Pro. While something like the Acacia might be better for baristas who make the same set of drinks over and over, he liked the Tally Pro for people like Brújula's recipe development team members.

“They are always adjusting. This would save them some time,” he said. “At home, it would be good for someone who likes to have friends over and make different cup sizes of different coffees. It could also be great for people with coffee subscriptions, who are always getting different kinds of beans.”

“If you always have the same coffee with the same recipe, you don't need this. It's too much information,” said Espinoza. “This is for coffee explorers.”

Beyond that, I really admired its wonderfully solid build. Even though it might be described as the love child of a record player crossed with a Roomba, it's somehow still quite good-looking, both simple and understated. The readout doesn't flutter like lesser scales sometimes do. We both really liked the ratio calculator, something that will always be useful. Plus, the more you use it, the more impressive and useful the intuitiveness becomes. With its scale and timer integration combined with a very pared-down interface, it's always ready for the next step, meaning making great coffee becomes faster and easier.

I asked Espinoza if he'd buy it for himself, and that seemed to depend on how much spare cash he might have on hand on some theoretical date in the future.

"However," he countered, "it would make a great gift for me."