Nicely manufactured unit with good fit and finish. Battery life seems low. I had to replace batteries in ours after less than 2 months of daily use. I also find the scale doesn't zero out reliably. I'll press the button to zero it out and it will initially show zero and then show 3-4 grams and I'll have to press the button to zero it out again. It holds less than the jar that comes with the KitchenAid grinder because of the scale mechanism. So, you may have to grind, empty and then grind more if you need more than about 100 grams of coffee for a 12-cup brew cycle.

A small BOWL scale.

I had high hopes for this for use with my Pro Line burr grinder and my Rancilio Silvia espresso machine. So far, I've been highly disappointed.

I didn't originally go out looking for a coffee scale. I was looking for a replacement grounds jar for my Pro Line burr grinder, after I dropped the jar on the edge of a glass pie plate and broke the jar. While looking for a new jar, I stumbled across the digital-scale jar and thought it was an excellent idea, so I gave it a try.

The problems started with installing the batteries. Finding the battery compartment door was easy. Removing the screw was easy. Prying the door out without damaging it was quite difficult, and getting the rubber gasket inside the door to go correctly back into place after installing the batteries was very fiddly. Now don't get me wrong, I think it's great that Kitchenaid put so much effort into making the battery compartment watertight. But a little more attention to the actual details, like say a fingernail groove under one edge of the door, would have helped a lot.

After installing the batteries, we move on to actually trying to use the scale, and there's a number of fundamental problems with this scale. The first problem that becomes apparent is that the load cell does not weigh just the hopper. It weighs almost the entire scale, including the control panel. The ONLY unsprung weight on this scale is the battery box assembly. This presents a problem that should be immediately apparent: You cannot tare the scale because your pressure on the tare button is added into the tare weight. The instant you remove your finger from the tare button, the zero is wrong "” even assuming it actually tared to zero in the first place, which it usually doesn't. This makes the tare button useless. By trying to use it, you upset the tare by as much as ±20g. With excruciating care, I can sometimes get it to tare to within about 5g. But 5g off zero is not zero.

There is only one way to actually tare this scale, and that is to turn it off, wait a few seconds, then turn it back on and get your finger off the power button QUICK. I can hardly believe a design defect this bad could have made it through product testing.

(They DID test it, right...?)

The second problem is that because Kitchenaid had to use a load cell that could return almost the entire weight of the scale from which to subtract the tare, yet still indicate load to individual grams, this scale is exceedingly twitchy. Its display often jumps about by 5g or more at a time while you're grinding coffee, and sometimes fluctuates by as much as several grams on its own even when you're not touching it. Its effective reliable measure seems to be about ±5g. A 10g range of error is huge when you're trying to accurately weigh 18g of coffee for a doppio espresso shot. A variation of ±2g can massively affect the quality of the shot. 5g over won't even fit in the portafilter. 5g under, and you'll brew brown hot water.

That's what I hoped this would do: eliminate the trial and error and allow me to accurately weigh my espresso shots. It's the one task this scale should be expected to do for which you actually need 1g resolution. But with a ±5g margin of error, it can't do it. This scale is actually LESS accurate at weighing out my espresso shots than my established method of simply counting off seconds. (I know that depending on the exact setting and the age of the beans, my Pro Line yields 2.5g to 3g per second of espresso grind.) It does not save me time or reduce errors. I can measure out my shots more accurately by counting off six seconds and stopping the grinder than by using the scale. Perhaps one shot in ten I may come up a little over or a little short. If I'm trying to rely on this scale, maybe one shot in ten is RIGHT on the first try.

If you're grinding a large enough volume of coffee that the ±5g error range on this scale doesn't matter, you don't need 1g resolution in the first place. "Half a cup" is close enough for a drip grinder or a French press (for example).

"You had ONE JOB... and you can't do it." Sorry, Kitchenaid, but this misconceived coffee scale gets two Technical Thug thumbs down.

If you own the coffee grinder attachment for a KitchenAid stand mixer, then this KITCHENAID KCG0799SX DIGITAL SCALE JAR BURR GRINDER ACCESSORY (Brushed Stainless Steel) is nice to have, but not really necessary--and it requires precious storage space, either in a cabinet or on your kitchen countertop. This is an accessory that I can definitely do without.

The accessory is gorgeous, but it's nothing more than a bowl-shaped food scale. It's powered by two AAA batteries (included and installed). There are two buttons, a Power button and a Tare button. If you place something inside or on top of the bowl, pressing the Tare button will bring the readout back to zero, so that the scale will separately weigh any additional thing(s) that you add to the scale.

The readout is in grams only. This is a negative feature, because most food scales are able to give several different readouts (e.g., grams, ounces, fluid ounces, etc.).

To use this accessory with the coffee grinder attachment, you do the following: (1) Measure your coffee beans by weight; (2) Pour the beans into the grinder; (3) Put the scale/bowl under the grinder to catch the ground coffee; (4) Pour the ground coffee into your coffee maker.

No cleaning instructions are included. Presumably you wipe the bowl with a damp cloth, because the battery box and scale platform are firmly attached to the stainless steel bowl.

This is simply a digital kitchen scale. It's bowl allows for measuring beans without spilling them with ease of transfer to the grinder. Measuring coffee beans by weight is the optimum method for a consistent brew, so it's helpful to have an easy method to measure them. That this is an attractive method makes it less offensive if it stays out on the counter; it also matches the rest of our brushed stainless steel Kitchenaid appliances in our kitchen.

This has completely replaced our previous kitchen scale, as the bowl is great for really anything that we are measuring with much less spillage. The only issue is that the maximum weight it will measure is 140 g which is sufficient for most ingredients you will be measuring by weight but not all.

In summary, we are incredibly happy with this scale, with its look and functionality. Especially if you have other brushed stainless appliances (we have many other Kitchenaid appliances which is makes for a near perfect match).