Hi there.
Today we're gonna review this.
It is the GINA Smart Coffee Brewer by Chemical Goat Story.
Now, this has been very heavily requested,
even though it was a product
that came out a little while ago.
I suspect, speaking to people, that it's because
it's popping up in a lot of people's Instagram feeds
that they're advertising very heavily at the moment.
And a lot of people wanna know, is it worth it?
So let's find out.
The name says smart coffee brewer, which suggests
that it's gonna need to connect to an app
and that is indeed the case.
And the way I'm gonna split this review up
is into two separate pieces, really.
There'll be a kind of a hardware review
and then a software review.
Now they do actually make two versions of this,
a smart version like this one and a not so smart version.
And what makes it a smart version is that
this part of the brewer here right at the base
is a Bluetooth connected scale.
They do do a version that does not have it
that's a little bit cheaper.
Now, this thing is pretty expensive.
It is $245.
What do you get for all of your money?
Well, they promise you three different coffee brewers.
This is designed to be a pour-over, an immersion brewer,
as well as it called drip brewer.
All of this is brought together by the smart scale,
connecting to an app and the app
really drives your experience of using this product.
In the box, you get a few things.
Obviously you get your filter here,
which has a built-in valve at the bottom of the filter
which will turn it from being an immersion brewer
to a sort of percolation brewer.
A carafe, very nice little glass carafe.
And then the base and the base is all one piece
that has the scale unit in and then the stand that holds
the cone and the valve.
It does come with a lid that goes on top of this thing.
I suspect for immersion brews
where people are worried about heat loss
or cold drip brews where they're worried
about things like dust or other stuff
getting into your brewing water if you're leaving it open
for a long time, I will say it doesn't fit very well.
It doesn't feel very good.
So I haven't really used it.
It does come out of the box with a couple of filter papers,
a little round one for the cold drip brewing
and then some standard V60 style ones.
And then lastly, your little cold drip funnel.
Now this is kind of interesting.
This, you would fill with coffee on top of the metal filter
and then you would place a filter paper on top
to help with water dispersion
so that single drop is spread evenly across all the grounds.
That sits inside your carafe
and that sits underneath.
You put cold water in here and open the valve,
just so it would drip, drip, drip out.
I have never enjoyed that kind of coffee making.
I find very long brew times tend to emphasize oxidation
which is my primary frustration with them.
If I'm gonna brew with cold water,
I want that brew to happen much, much faster.
So I'm not well-placed to give you a truly fair review
of this particular setup, but if you do like
these kinds of drip brewers,
we will talk about it towards the end.
I'll be mostly reviewing this from a pour over
slash immersion perspective.
Now, what I will do is brew some coffee
and begin to talk about the software experience.
Now, this is a, an expensive, smart scale.
If you look at the price difference
between the sort of normal brewer and the smart brewer,
it's an expensive bit of kit.
It's shocking to me, genuinely surprising to me
that it has no display.
You cannot use this without using your phone.
Now I did a pretty long sort of ranty video
about smart scales in the past,
you can click on it up here and have a watch.
If you wanna see me become quite frustrated
by decisions made around smart scales
and not having a display for me is really a big no-no.
It's incredibly frustrating and it throws up
two or three really big hurdles for me
around using this brewer.
But it's time to brew coffee.
And what I'll do is I'll actually use
the built-in scale here, which you can do with the app
to weigh out my coffee, to get going.
So let's fire up the app.
Now, if you wanna use this just as a scale,
quite frustratingly, it's not on the front page
where you pick your brew method.
It's actually within a menu into tools, into scale.
For me, that's a few too many clicks to get to
where I need to go.
As a scale, turn it down.
It's not super useful for weighing out
because you've got this fixed frame above you.
So it's a touch awkward.
You are doing some weird stuff, is it 'cause I'm touching,
oh, interesting.
I hadn't spotted that.
This is worth noting.
If you accidentally hit the top of the scale with your bag,
it will change the weight.
It'll pull up on the load cell.
So if you want an accurate reading,
it's not the easiest thing in the world.
Okay let's work with, sort of 20.7 grams
because I'm not, I'm not gonna use any more right now.
I'll grind that I've got a filter paper in here.
I'm not gonna use their papers.
I'm gonna use a bleached paper
and then we'll get ready to brew and walk you through
that part of the process.
So the app offers a few choices on how you're gonna brew,
pour over, immersion and cold drip,
as well as the kind of brew bar option.
Now I'm gonna go back and use the pour over method,
but I'm not necessarily gonna do
what they want me to do with it.
Explain. So let's add our coffee.
It now knows we've added 20.4 grams.
We've lost 0.3 grams along the way somewhere.
And what's a little bit frustrating for me
is it calculates for you your desired water,
but it works in fixed ratios
and it doesn't remember the ratio that you used
the last time around
I generally brew my one to 16 rather than one to 15
and even though I've only ever used one to 16,
every time I open and pour over it's one to 15,
it's kind of preset.
That's a little bit frustrating for me.
Now here at the top, you've got your total weight in
versus your target weight.
Most of the screen real estate is set to time
which is kind of interesting where I think
that's a kind of a decision I would have flipped
in a funny sort of way.
I'd have kept the timer relatively small
and really focused on how much water you're adding
because I think ratio is crucial
for a consistent execution of a recipe.
Now I can drag up my balloon timer.
I'll take it to 45 seconds, which I generally like.
Now some people have said with my V60 technique,
which is up here, if you wanna watch it,
that they struggled to really get the bloom
sort of fully wet
and that the water can drain through a little bit quickly.
I think often they need to ground a little bit finer
but in this case, it's no concern I can close the valve.
No liquid can escape.
And so I can make sure
that my bloom is properly stirred, swirled, mixed
and ready to go.
So let's brew and we got our nice three, two, one countdown.
I will pour a little bit of water
and now it doesn't give you guidance
for how much bloom water to put it.
I'm gonna put it in, say 47 grams
and then I can give it a little swirl
and everyone's nice and mixed them nice and happy.
And nothing's really going on yet.
And in fact, I'm gonna let this steep
like a little emersion brew for a little while.
And, and once my bloom time is up,
then I'm gonna open the valve and pour
and begin to brew as a normal V60.
Despite the fact that we've got a lot of information
on the screen, it doesn't really give you any guidance
on how quickly to pour, if you wanna do multiple pours,
there's no real option for that part there.
Or if you wanna do kind of one long pour,
I guess you're just chasing your total target weight.
As an approach, it's different to many other
smart scale manufacturers.
Now it does change to finishing your brew at the top,
but again, it doesn't really encourage you
into real accuracy in that part of the process.
If you do wanna pick this up and do a little swirl,
not a bad thing, but just know
that it is really pretty hot to the touch.
In an ideal world, I might have a rubberized band around it
but that presumes everyone brews coffee just like me
and they don't, nor necessarily should they.
And again, maybe it might be worth closing the valve
if you're gonna do a swirl, but overall,
probably a spoon stir one direction then the other
is your best bet here to aim for that nice flat,
even bed at the end of your brew.
We'll let this drain out.
We're aiming for a kind of four minute brew time
under this particular setup that you can obviously
customize it in the app before you start brewing.
Okay, so I'm gonna hit done.
And what it wants you to do now is lift the carafe up
so it can calculate theoretically how
much liquid is in here.
Interesting to me is
that it always, always gets this calculation wrong
looking at this right now.
There's simply no way that it can be correct.
Now, typically a gram of coffee in a pour over
will absorb a hold onto around two grams of water.
So if I start with 20 grams of ground coffee
I would anticipate losing at least 40 grams
of my initial brew water to the grounds left in the bed.
This thinks I've lost nine grams of liquid.
It's saying that my brew beverage is gonna be 316 grams.
If I get a weighing scale, tada,
then it turns out I've actually got
a much more expected 285 grams.
Now I guess it knows or thinks it knows the weight
of the glass vessel and therefore knows the amount
of sort of weight deducted from the scale.
And if it takes away the way of the glass vessel
that it thinks it knows then it should give you
an accurate outcome, but it doesn't.
As for cups of coffee that I've had from this,
they have been very good.
They've been as good as a V60
or in some cases slightly better
because I do like a sort of mix and match
between steep and release and a straight kind of pour over.
So having a closed valve during the bloom
has been my preference,.
Back to the app for just a second.
At the end of every brew, what it calls a brew print.
Now I haven't saved most of these
for a reason we'll get into,
but blueprint is a word used by Acaia and others
to represent your sort of time and cumulative weight.
It's a frustrating use of that term here
when that doesn't really track much at all
about how your brew happened.
It just tells you the kind of end result.
On this page, it wants you to add notes.
It wants you to take a photo of the brew.
Take a little photo, I guess.
And then it was gonna put in attributes.
What's confusing to me is that while I have this app open,
as soon as I finished brewing, I haven't drank my coffee.
So this presumes that I'm gonna come back into the app
after I finished tasting the coffee to finish this process.
But it feels weird to me to abandon the process
before I've hit save or anything like that.
If I wanted to capture that initial data.
I suspect many people don't add ratings or that kind
of stuff to it.
My big frustration, honestly,
is that by default saving your blueprint
publishes it within the kind of community,
social media kind of tab inside the app,
a default set to public.
I'm not really okay with.
I think it should be default set to private
and you can choose to share it if you want to.
So for now, I'm gonna hit private and hit save
and away it goes and you can look at past brews
and see if you liked them or you didn't like them
or all that kind of stuff.
It's always frustrating to me when people invest heavily
in the infrastructure necessary for brewers to share
that kind of information.
If you look on someone like Instagram,
which is a huge social network,
not that many people share brew recipes there.
I mean, some people do, but really not many.
So trying to cultivate a niche activity
inside a niche app seems to me a strangeness
and I, that default public thing freaks me out.
Now I did have a look yesterday, 27 brews were shared.
I don't know where there most people would rather
not hit publish and choose to save privately
or they just don't bother saving
or not that many people are using it.
It's a kind of weird showcase aspect to the app.
I can't learn from other people's brews
and I don't think people truly wanted to share
the coffee they brewed, especially
right after they brewed it, and so
we don't need another network to do that
with all the privacy concerns or other stuff
that you might have about sharing your life with companies.
We should say, I'm not saying Goat Story
are doing anything nefarious with your data.
I just think we don't think enough
about how much of the data that really belongs to us
that we just give away or share with others.
And so while it makes really nice coffee,
I find the fact that you are forced into an app
that isn't particularly intuitive, frustrating.
I find the fact that you can't brew this thing
without your phone being open frustrating.
Now I said, they do do a version that is cheaper
that has no smart scaling base.
And honestly, I would recommend that version over this one
if you're looking for this kind of a package.
Regardless of which version you buy, though,
it is a big brewer.
This is tall, and that means it's gonna be out
on your counter the entire time
and that means it's gonna be pretty out away from,
let's say, cupboards above your counter top
so that it's easier to use.
That that limits its place in the kitchen, I think.
Honestly, my favorite part of this brewer
is this piece here.
The combination of a nice pour over funnel
and a really well-made valve, I think is a very good thing.
There are cheaper versions.
You could use a clever drip like that if you wanted to.
You've got something like the Hario Switch,
which is much cheaper again,
but I don't think anyone has executed this combination
quite as nicely as this.
I really like the, feel the look,
the experience of this valve.
I just don't really enjoy it being attached
to this large frame attached to what is essentially
a hundred dollars scale that has no display.
I think it can make great coffee.
I think this aspect of this that I think
are really well designed and really well engineered.
I suspect people will buy these, use them a little bit
but that constant kind of forcing into an app
will mean that many people would just become
frustrated with that part of the process and stop using it.
It's got a lot of potential.
There's a lot to like about it, but it is very expensive.
And you can argue, yes, you get three brewers in one.
It's like getting a V60, a clever dripper
and a nice cold dripper all in one
and if you bought those separately, would you spend $145?
Maybe, maybe not.
A nice cold drip brewer can cost quite a lot of money.
It can cost this much but there are
cheaper alternatives out there,
things like the PuckPuck, for example,
if you wanna do that kind of cold drip brewing
I still feel like there are real possibilities
and potential in combining technology with coffee brewing,
but I still felt like the execution in many cases,
just isn't there.
People aren't focusing on the user experience quite enough.
So it's expensive.
It looks great.
It's really well made.
It can make delicious coffee.
You have to think about what works for you
and what your needs are and where you might be frustrated
and looking to fix a problem in your coffee brewing.
And this would have to be a quite a specific answer
but it may well be your answer.
Now, this brewer, this goes to one of my Patreon backers
and I'm grateful to my Patreon backers
for giving me a budget every month to go
and buy these things like a normal person and review them.
But I don't wanna keep them.
I get to give them away at the end.
So one of those backers will be getting this thing.
I'd love to hear your thoughts now.
Did you back this in the Kickstarter?
Did you get one early?
I think you paid maybe $175,
which is cheaper for this, not 245,
but do you feel like it was money well spent?
Do you use it every single day?
I would really love to hear your thoughts
down in the comments below,
but for now that's my thoughts.
I wanna hear your thoughts.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you have a great day.
I should say, if you want one of these
weird coffee person mugs,
we have very limited quantities left now.
There's a link down the description.
There are two colors available.
There's also T-shirts as well.
They're pretty limited.
I really love drinking a cup of coffee
out of a cup of coffee drinking a cup of coffee,
but that's just me.