When you’re making pour-over coffee, there’s an awful lot of room for guesswork. How much coffee should you use? How much water? How quickly should you pour it, and how long should the whole process take? You can certainly make a decent cup of coffee without measuring everything, but if you’re trying to get consistent results, a scale and timer make an enormous difference.
That’s why I bought the Maestri House S2 coffee scale with timer. In fact, I’ve bought two of them, one for home and another for the office. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to take some of the guesswork out of making coffee, and having both the weight and timer in one compact device makes the whole process considerably easier.
Why a Scale and Timer Actually Matter
I’m a bit of a coffee geek (or so I like to think, at least). I enjoy coffee enough that I genuinely want to get better at making it. If I’m going to bother grinding the beans properly, using the right filters and carefully controlling the pour with my Hario V60 Drip Kettle AIR, I might as well know exactly how much coffee and water I’m using.
Using a scale takes much of the guesswork out of following a recipe. You can measure your dose, track how much water you’ve added and repeat the same process the next day. But I think the timer is just as important. The coffee grounds don’t always behave identically, and neither does my pouring. Sometimes the water flows through a little faster or slower than expected, and being able to see how much time has passed makes it easier to adjust the remaining pours rather than just hoping for the best.
I use the weight and timer together whenever I’m making coffee with the scale. At the office, I sometimes skip the whole measuring process and make a quick pour-over using the volume markings on the Hario AIR instead. But when I actually want to follow a recipe properly, I use both. I think learning to make a consistent pour-over with a scale and timer is worthwhile, even if you eventually become comfortable enough to make a decent cup without them.
Could you manage with a normal kitchen scale and a timer on your phone? Of course. But frankly, having to mess about with two separate devices while you’re trying to pour hot water over coffee is unnecessarily annoying. The S2 removes that inconvenience entirely.
Simple Controls That Just Work
Using the S2 is straightforward. There’s a physical power switch on the right-hand side, while the weighing and timer functions are operated through smooth touch-sensitive controls.
Resetting the weight to zero is simply a matter of touching the appropriate control, and starting or pausing the timer works much the same way. There’s a pleasant little confirmation beep by default, which provides audible feedback even though the buttons themselves don’t physically click.
The touch controls also require a reasonably deliberate touch, almost like using a fingerprint scanner. That’s actually a good thing. I’ve splashed water onto the scale during normal use and haven’t had any problems with it accidentally resetting the weight or interfering with the timer. You don’t have to worry about every little splash activating something.
The scale also supports measurement units other than grams, although I couldn’t tell you much about them because I’ve never bothered exploring those settings. I switched it on, started weighing coffee in grams and got on with making coffee. It was pretty much ready to use straight out of the box, which is exactly how I like things.
There’s also a really nice removable rubber mat on top, which helps keep cups and brewing equipment stable while protecting the weighing surface from hot cups and freshly boiled water. It’s a thoughtful and genuinely useful addition, and one of the details I particularly like about the S2. The downside is that the soft rubber picks up cup rings and watermarks surprisingly easily, as you can see in my photograph, and it’s harder to get completely clean than the smooth, glass-like surface underneath. It’s not a serious problem, but it’s another little reminder that this is a fairly average product overall.
Accuracy, Charging and Battery Life
The S2 measures in 0.1 g increments, which is more than sufficient for the way I make coffee. I’m sure there are more expensive scales that offer additional features or finer measurements, but I genuinely can’t see why I’d need them for weighing a normal dose of coffee beans or measuring water for a pour-over.
It charges through USB-C, which is convenient enough. Unfortunately, the supplied charging cable is so ridiculously short that I can’t see much point in including it. It also feels rather flimsy, and I’d much rather just use one of the USB-C cables I already own. It’s a small complaint, but one of those slightly pointless accessories that would hardly be missed.
As for battery life, I’ve used both scales intermittently for several weeks and have only charged each of them once. That doesn’t tell me exactly how long they’d last under heavy daily use, but so far it’s been good enough that I simply haven’t had to think about it.
For something like this, that’s pretty much what I want. I don’t need another device that constantly demands charging or attention when all I’m trying to do is make a cup of coffee.
It’s Fine, but Nothing Particularly Special
One thing I would point out is that, while the S2 works well enough, it doesn’t inspire quite the same confidence in its overall quality as some of my other coffee equipment. My Hario, for example, have generally impressed me with how thoughtfully designed and well made they feel. I don’t quite get that same impression from the Maestri House.
That’s not to say the S2 feels badly made. It doesn’t. The construction feels fine, the controls work, and I haven’t experienced any problems with either of mine. There’s just nothing about it that particularly stands out in terms of quality or design. It feels like a perfectly ordinary little electronic scale that happens to have a timer built into it.
I even had a look at whether I’d be better off spending my money elsewhere if I were buying another one. But at roughly the same price point, I couldn’t find anything that looked particularly better or more convincing. So while the S2 doesn’t exactly excite me, I also don’t see much reason to replace it with something else in the same category.
It’s fine. And sometimes fine is all you’re going to get for the money.
The Main Limitation: It’s Really for One Cup
The S2 is extremely compact, which is both one of its advantages and its biggest limitation. For making a single cup with my Hario V60 01, it’s a perfectly sensible size. It takes up very little space and fits neatly underneath my usual brewing setup.
However, I’ve also used a larger Hario decanter at the office when making several cups, and that’s where the S2 becomes considerably less practical. The scale can weigh up to approximately 2 kg, so the weighing capacity itself isn’t the problem. It’s the tiny platform. A larger decanter can overhang the scale and make the display difficult to see, which rather defeats the purpose of having a scale in the first place.
And that’s an important distinction. A scale might be capable of weighing a considerable amount on paper, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s physically suitable for whatever you’re trying to put on it. The S2 is perfectly comfortable underneath a single cup, but a larger decanter starts to feel rather oversized for such a small platform, particularly when you’re trying to monitor the weight and timer while pouring.
If you’re regularly making several cups at once, I’d strongly suggest looking for a physically larger coffee scale, such as the Maestri House S3 Pour Over Coffee Scale with Timer. That model also offers extras such as brew-ratio and flow-rate information. Looking back, the S3 might have been a more sensible choice for the office, with the smaller S2 staying at home for my single cups. I haven’t used the S3 myself, so that’s a consideration rather than a hands-on verdict.
Verdict: Perfectly Adequate, and That’s About It
The Maestri House S2 does what I bought it to do. It weighs coffee in sufficiently small increments, has a useful built-in timer, straightforward touch controls and convenient USB-C charging. The rubber mat protects the scale well, even if it’s a nuisance to clean thoroughly, and I haven’t had any reliability issues with either of my scales.
But I wouldn’t call it a particularly impressive product. It doesn’t have the same reassuring feeling of quality that I get from some of my other coffee equipment, and there’s nothing especially remarkable about its design. Even the included charging cable feels like something that was thrown into the box because somebody thought there should be one.
Would I buy it again? Maybe. Would I recommend it? Also maybe. Not because it’s a bad product, but because it depends on your brewing setup and what you expect for your money. If you’re making one cup at a time and want an inexpensive scale with a timer, it’s a perfectly reasonable choice. If you’re brewing larger batches, I’d definitely look for something physically bigger.
And having looked at alternatives around the same price, I haven’t found anything that particularly convinces me I’d be getting a better deal elsewhere. That’s hardly a glowing endorsement, but it’s a fairly sensible reason to stick with what I’ve got.
Ultimately, it’s a scale with a timer. It works, it’s fine, and I don’t have much else to say about it. Which, in fairness, might be exactly what you want from a scale. Perhaps it’s the supporting player in my little symphony orchestra of coffee: it won’t steal the show, but it still has its part to play.