If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED
Eyeballs are great: I have two. I also like spoons. But if you want a consistent coffee dose for great espresso or pour-over, a precise scale is the mildly inconvenient one true path.
I can still remember a time when in order to weigh out my coffee beans each morning, I placed a little dosing cup atop a digital scale, and then pressed a button on the scale, and then waited a second or so for the scale’s display to zero out before pouring coffee beans into the dosing cup. Back in the sands of time—October of 2024, I think it was—I didn’t consider this a dire inconvenience. It’s just how coffee scales work.
But perhaps they don’t need to. Over the past year or so, a few coffee brands have cottoned to the simple idea that a dosing cup and scale could be combined into one device. Trigger lightbulbs above foreheads, and bluebirds on shoulders. Perhaps the most elegant of these is the Subscale, new from Singapore coffee brand Subminimal (also the maker of our favorite milk frother).
The Subscale is a black-on-black swoop of a cup that’ll hold about 60 grams of coffee, and whose base contains a scale accurate to a tenth of a gram. Ever since I’ve gotten it, the device hasn’t left my countertop—and it’s made me enjoy my morning coffee ritual a little bit more.
Keep It Simple
The key to the Subscale’s appeal is its dogged simplicity. The craft coffee world now brims with new and complicated and sometimes confusing conveniences. Once a humble tool, the coffee scale has ballooned into a home base for all manner of coffee wonkery. The Fellow Tally Pro (8/10, WIRED Recommends) will do math for you, simul-tabulating recommended water weights for ideal brewing ratios. The Bluetooth-enabled Acaia Pearl S will track your brewing time and the flow rate of your water, while playing music besides.
The Subscale doesn’t do any of this.
It’s a cup. It’s a lightweight, crisply minimalist cup with a feather-sensitive scale on its bottom that measures the precise weight of what’s inside. There’s no Bluetooth, no app, and no particular learning curve. It takes up very little space on my counter, and it looks nice there.
The Subscale also doesn’t assist in brewing, nor play songs. Here’s what it does: I press the nigh-invisible button on the front, which activates a flashy little LED display on the interior surface of the cup. If the cup’s on a level surface, the scale on its bottom will tare itself out to 0.0 grams. (Double-tap the button to switch to ounces and back.)
Now it’s ready for beans. You pour in coffee up to the appropriate weight. Then you pour the beans back out into your grinder. That’s it. That’s what the Subscale is good for, and mostly … kinda … well, nothing else. You can technically pour hot coffee into it, and then maybe drink it, if you’re the sort of person who wants to drink coffee out of a dosing cup.
The Subscale is indeed liquid-resistant in a casual way, enough to house hot coffee or allow you to clean it by rinsing—though don’t go wild by submersing it in the sink or putting it in a dishwasher. Though shaped like a cup, it’s still an electric scale with a battery inside.
Otherwise the Subscale is svelte, and made of lightweight and BPA-free black Tritan polymer, and it’s pretty, in a high-tech Steve Jobs kind of way. It comes with a USB-C charger I haven’t had to use yet. Company materials swear you probably won’t need to charge the device more than twice a year.
No Timer, No Cry
That’s all it does. The Subscale hews tightly to its full-assed, single purpose. If you need your coffee scale to have a timer, this one doesn’t have that. You’ll have to use your phone to time out pour-overs or optimal espresso pulls.
Since the top is angled, it also doesn’t work well as a catch-cup for your grinder. Unlike the somewhat similar Bruer Scale Dosing Cup, also new this year, the SubScale won’t meld seamlessly to a portafilter for tamping while making espresso.
That said, there’s such a thing as too much minimalism. Specifically, the Subscale falls prey to an Apple-loving design geek’s weird allergy to buttons. The Subscale’s single black button is pretty much invisible and flush against the blackness of the cup, which means you might take two tries to turn the thing on. This can also cause trouble when doing gram-to-ounce conversions, which require a double-tap: A toggle switch at the device’s base would be more helpful, without mussing up the smooth surface of the cup.
But these are small and fixable frustrations. Most coffee grinders come with a catch cup, anyway. The fact remains it’s an innovative and beautifully precise scale, at a reasonable price, that has managed to declutter both my kitchen counter and my brewing routine. It’s a nice little indulgence that simplifies my life without simultaneously complicating it—a solution to a problem I didn’t even know was a problem until it solved it.