Garrett Oden

August 25, 2019

Riff Cold Brewed Launches New RTD Sparkling Coffee Cherry (not Coffee Bean) Tea

Riff Cold Brewed, a ready to drink beverage maker in the coffee space, recently released its new Alter Ego beverage, an innovative line extension that uses coffee fruit—not coffee beans—to insert itself into the increasingly diverse RTD beverage aisle.

The drink is made from cascara, the dried coffee “cherry” that’s left behind once the beans are harvested. Cold brewed and carbonated, Alter Ego is a slightly-sweet alternative to the super sugary drinks that are common in grocery stores and gas stations, with 6g of sugar, 35 calories, and 105mg of caffeine—roughly the same amount as a small cup of coffee.

You may have tasted cascara at a hip coffee shop. Prepared like a tisane or tea, it’s known for its fruity flavor, a subtle sweetness, and a mild acidic tang.

We spoke to Paul Evers, Co-Founder and CEO of Riff, about how this product fits into the greater strategy of Riff: “We see the opportunity as consumers are seeking more natural, clean-label alternatives,” he said. “It’s positioned as a sparkling coffee tea.”

In coffee producing countries, spent coffee cherries are sometimes used as compost or sold to exporters to be distributed as tea in the United States, but more often than not, they end up in massive piles at the end of the farm, left to rot.

“We remove harmful environmental impact from rotting cascara that creates methane and toxins that leak into the soils,” Paul explained. “This allows farmers to turn their spent cherries into a new revenue stream. It can be a good uplift for mostly family-owned farms.”

With the c-market price for coffee beans left at under $1 per pound for over a year, the global coffee industry is in crisis. Millions of coffee producers aren’t turning a profit this year. Being able to monetize cascara, a byproduct that’s typically been considered waste, can help make up that difference for farmers.

Riff Cold Brewed isn’t the first company to try bringing cascara into the mainstream. Raleigh’s Slingshot Coffee released the first RTD cascara product back in 2013, and was quickly followed by both industry leaders and startups like Stumptown and Caskai.

But Paul’s confident the growing competition isn’t too big of a problem: “Many existing cascara products over-extract from the cherry, so the end result is too heavy and strong. Our product is light and refreshing.” The drink’s smoothness also makes it a great base layer for further innovation, so Paul also is exploring launching new flavors from juice concentrates, like stone fruit, berry, or ginger.

As someone who’s tried cascara from several origin countries—tasting flavors I didn’t expect, from honey to lime to bell peppers—I was curious how Riff would handle the diverse range of flavors of cascara. Paul sent me a few cans so I could find out. The first thing I noticed was the cascara’s natural fruitiness, which is similar to that of a cherry or red berry and slightly sweet. The natural mild acidity, enhanced by the carbonation, added a citrus note that made me think of a fruit-infused lemonade. It was smooth, refreshing, and delicate.

The Original Alter Ego is now available in stores across the Pacific Northwest at $2.99 SRP for a 12fl oz can. However, it’s also Riff Cold Brewed’s first product that can be shipped at ambient temperatures, thanks to improved pasteurization processes, making it ripe for direct-to-consumer sales via the company’s website.

July 12, 2019

Now You Can Get Unlimited Coffee From Cafes For $11/wk (in Berlin)

Coffee bean subscriptions are all the rage right now, but Bonaverde, originally a coffee roast-grind-brew hardware startup, is taking the hype to a whole new level: a flat rate subscription for cups of coffee brewed in over 100 real-world locations in Berlin.

The team’s newest project, the Urban Coffee Club, offers Berlin coffee lovers unlimited cups of coffee in more than 100 locations in the city for a flat rate of €10 per week.

To learn more about the origins of the Urban Coffee Club (UCC), as well as how it makes sense economically, we reached out to Alex Greif, COO at Bonaverde.

“Like Spotify, we offer unlimited coffee at a flat rate,” Alex said. “But like Airbnb, we don’t own any of the locations that serve the coffee, we just connect them to the service and let consumers choose which one they’d like to go to.”

Here’s how it works: Bonaverde partners with “coffee corners”, which can be cafes, restaurants, yoga studios, bookstores, or anywhere that has existing coffee equipment. Bonaverde sends those corners roasted coffee beans for free—much of it from Bonaverde’s own supply chain, but also from local roasters who offer free beans to the service to get their product in front of consumers.

Each week, Bonaverde selects 5-10 different coffee beans from their own stash and partner roasters, then delivers them to coffee corners across Berlin according to predictive models that anticipate demand. Each location is given one type of coffee bean, and it’s never the same week-to-week. Consumers then have the power to look at the app and choose a coffee corner according to proximity, ratings and reviews, or the bean offering. Coffee corners simply brew the beans and hand it over to the UCC customer.

“In Germany,” Alex continued, “it’s common for businesses to provide some kind of side service that attracts people. Often it’s DHL package drop-off points, but that takes a lot of storage and you have a DHL employee in and out every day. With coffee, it’s totally free, it takes virtually zero extra storage, and coffee corners can have a steady flow of relevant customers stopping by.”

The club’s coffee corners, for the most part, do not run their business on coffee sales, but food. The hopes are that UCC customers will come get their coffee, then stay for a sandwich or treat. And, if their experience is positive, maybe they’ll come back in the future.

It makes sense for the coffee corners who are happy to have additional foot traffic. It makes sense for local roasters who want to get their coffee in front of customers. But does it make sense for Bonaverde? At just €1 per cup of coffee on the Lite plan, do the economics work out?

“The idea is that creating an economy of scale—buying coffee for over 100 locations—brings down the cost and makes it work,” Alex said.

He also explained that most customers don’t actually drink a cup per day in cafes. Many of them have a cup at home or at work. Paying €10 per week for unlimited coffee, for many people, is less about the certainty of getting coffee at a great price, but the ease and availability of the cafe experience.

The Urban Coffee Club has only been live for just over one week, but there are already over 200 paying members. Alex will soon have promoters on the streets telling people about the club, and he’s eagerly signing on new coffee corners in different neighborhoods of the city.

Alex has his sights set beyond Berlin for 2020: “We want to prove it here, then build it into a platform solution where we can basically add in the roasters, add in the corners, add in the users, and then take it to any city in the world and replicate it.”

The Urban Coffee Club has a way to go before it’s ready to dominate Europe’s coffee market. For one, the signup experience in the app has been so problem-ridden that at a pop-up UCC booth, they had to full-on embrace how bad it was with a display that humorously said “Home of the *worst* signup experience”. Bonaverde’s also looking for investor partners to give them the capital they need to continue growing. And with only a week in the books and zero precedent for this kind of business model with coffee, it’s still unclear how the model will fare long-term.

But after having created the Urban Coffee Club completely from scratch—from raw idea to 100 coffee corners—in just six weeks, who knows? Maybe it won’t be long before we’re all paying a flat rate for coffee after all.

June 21, 2019

This New Kind Of Coffee Roaster Goes From Room-Temp To 700° In 3 Seconds

Inventor Glen Poss isn’t afraid to rustle some feathers. In fact, he’s betting on it. For nearly 20 years he’s been dreaming up a new way to roast coffee that eliminates the need for coffee sourcing trips, big roasting gear, and even roasting training—three things that coffee industry giants point at to demonstrate top-dogness.

He believes he’s on the cusp of decentralizing the coffee roasting industry with his 20-years-in-the-making invention: The Aria Coffee Roaster. Naturally, we hopped on a call to see what the Aria’s all about.

The idea came to Glen back in 1999 when his friend let him borrow a small home coffee roasting device: “I spun the little machine up, it smoked like crazy, the chaff caught on fire, and it was as noisy as a vacuum cleaner. The machine was s***, but I realized the market and business looked pretty good.”

Glen spent years exploring ways to make coffee roasting accessible to the consumer. He knew if he wanted to enable mass adoption, it couldn’t be a device for hobbyists. It had to be as simple as an appliance. “It can’t be about being an artisan. It’s about getting the customer what they want, in their pajamas, while they’re hungover. It has to be easy as toast.”

He claims he invented three new ways to roast coffee—two of which wouldn’t ever work in a consumer environment. But the third way, which Glen’s not ready fully disclose, is truly novel. “Say it’s ‘zero airflow’ roasting,” he said. “No smoke, no odor, steam, takes less than ten minutes—if they can guess how we do it, I want them to come work for me.”

We can say, however, what the result is: a countertop roaster that can go from room temperature to 700 degrees Fahrenheit in just 3 seconds. There’s no smoke, no odor, and no oxygen in the roasting chamber, which means there’s no risk of the thin chaff catching fire. The single-cell consumer model is expected to retail at $199.

How The Aria Coffee Roaster Works

At first glance, the Aria doesn’t seem to depart from the typical roasting routine: consumers pull out a pouch of pre-portioned green coffee beans sourced and delivered by Aria, scan the RFID chip and select one of the four suggested roast profiles (much like the Bonaverde, or the Kelvin), put the beans in the device, shut the door, and press start.

When the roast is complete, somewhere between four and ten minutes later, cold water is pumped around the roasting chamber, instantly cooling it to a safe 150 degrees.

But here’s where things aren’t so normal. The four recommended roast profiles for each bean include three standard profiles—light, medium, and dark—but also one that completely defies the conventional wisdom of coffee roasting: ‘high delta’.

Glen wanted to recreate the coffee roasting process involved in the Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Rather than being a single roast level from surface to center, these coffees are more like a rare steak, featuring varying roast levels within a single bean and leading to an unusually complex flavor experience (though many will argue this introduces imbalance).

But Glen didn’t want to stop at four options. Consumers can decline the suggested profiles and choose any one of nearly 100 roast profiles that are loaded onto the machine at any point.

There’s also an app that lets the more experimental home roasters take full control over their roast profiles—but there’s a catch: they’ll instantly void the warranty of their machine.

“The app’s a use at your own risk kind of thing,” Glen explained. “If someone wants to try roasting an empty cartridge at 700 degrees for ten minutes and melt the steel, well, that’s on them. We have no control with the app, so there’s no warranty.”

Dreaming Of Disruption In The Coffee Industry

Glen touched on something we’ve written a lot about at The Spoon: the democratization of coffee roasting. By building a commercial model of the Aria, he intends to take roasting away from remote facilities and put it directly in the hands of baristas and cafes.

“Roasting facilities cost a lot of money, labor, and time. Then you have to ship out the beans everywhere,” Glen said. “With our tech, whether it’s in cafes, restaurants, or at home, you don’t need to raise any money or get permits. That’s how we disrupt coffee: we decentralize it.”

But Glen’s not the only one trying to beat the hub-and-spoke model. Bellwether Coffee, whose zero-emission coffee roasters require no permit or ventilation to operate, is already giving the power of on-site roasting to cafes around the country.

Glen’s approach, however, is quite different from Bellwether’s. The Aria roaster is “based on the idea of a multi-engine craft: you can run as many or as little as you need, and if one ‘cell’ dies, you have backups so you never ‘crash’.”

The 4-cell commercial Aria model will enable everyday baristas to roast coffee for customers on demand, with an output of up to 7.5 pounds of roasted coffee per hour.

Once again, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which says that coffee needs at least 24 hours to “degas” before it’s ready to be brewed for maximum flavor and balance. Glen isn’t worried, however, because he claims the technology is so different that it enables coffee to be roasted, brewed, and enjoyed within minutes of each other without sacrificing quality.

Glen and his team are actively seeking a CEO who can take the Aria Coffee Roaster to investors, then to market in the next few years.

May 15, 2019

BKON’s RAIN Tech Extends Ready to Drink Cold Brew Coffee Shelf Life By 5,000 Percent

Ready to drink (RTD) cold brew coffee may be on the verge of another boom. BKON, the company behind the commercial sized Storm Brewer, announced that an independent study has confirmed they’ve essentially cracked the code to RTD cold brew coffee freshness.

The study, conducted in partnership with a “leading coffee roaster” and the third-party lab EMSL Analytical Inc., concluded that BKON’s RAIN (Reverse Atmospheric Infusion) technology increased the lifespan of a cold brew coffee product’s apex freshness—the period where the natural flavors are crisp, clear, and nuanced—from 1-2 days to 120+ days.

“The strength of craft coffee is that it’s nuanced and complex when fresh. The problem is, it’s never been scalable in a packaged form,” Lou Vastardis, Co-Founder of BKON, told me yesterday. “We now enable coffee companies to deliver flavor experiences that are equally as compelling on the packaged cold side as they are on the in-house hot side.”

The twelve-month study involved periodic flavor and aroma testing to see when the first major drop-off in quality occurred compared to traditional methods of preserving freshness. The parties found that one SKU remained consistently fresh tasting for 120 days, with another SKU lasting 180 days before the tasty qualities of apex freshness were lost.

I was lucky enough to try cold brew coffee made with RAIN tech at the BKON booth of last month’s Specialty Coffee Expo. Despite being brewed weeks before the expo, it was surprisingly more complex and nuanced than many of the brews I tasted that had been made moments before on the show floor.

Additional tests were conducted simultaneously to check for microbial growth like lactic bacteria, a generally harmless organism that causes RTD cold brew coffee to begin souring 45 days after being made. EMSL’s tests, however, couldn’t detect any of the tested bacteria until 273 days.

Because of the quality limitations of existing shelf life tech for coffee, brands have historically had to choose either limiting their distribution to reduce shelf time or heat-treating their products, which tends to flatten the flavor experience for the customer. Neither solution helps brands effectively scale the experience of sipping fresh cold brew at a coffee shop.

The tech behind RAIN works by creating a vacuum that sucks out all the gasses from the ingredient structures. Water is then able to flow into those empty spaces, gaining uninhibited access to the ingredient’s natural flavors and aromas. The BKON team can then create complex recipes that manipulate temperature, strength, duration, and frequency of the vacuum cycles to extract precise flavors from the ingredients in a way that’s impossible with low-tech consumer gear. But the major benefit, confirmed by the study, is the flavor security of this method.

Customers will be able to replicate cafe-quality experiences on-the-go, and brands will be able to expand their reach without sacrificing flavor quality or operational inefficiency.

And yet, despite the historical limitations, the RTD cold brew market experienced a 2015-2017 boom, bringing products from innovators like RISE Brewing Co and La Colombe to the shelves of thousands of convenience and grocery stores around the country. Is BKON too late to the cold brew party?

“Nobody misses cafe-level quality when they’re looking at cold brew drinks in the convenience store, because it hasn’t ever been an option in the first place,” Vastardis joked. And he’s probably right: when consumers realize their packaged coffee drink doesn’t have to taste like it was made last month, we’ll likely be in for sweeping product line improvements impacting everything from existing RTD iced brews to up-and-coming CBD-infused coffee drinks.

But Vastardis has his eyes set on more than coffee. BKON plans to adapt its RAIN tech for all types of craft beverages, from teas to spirits to waters.

“When we create a citrus water, for example, we’re using actual parts of a lemon—maybe fermented or dried—and we’re able to create farm-to-bottle waters from natural ingredients (not lab-made flavor additives) that soften the operational burden caused by a short shelf life for beverage companies.”

Keep an eye on your local store’s refrigerated beverage section. If BKON’s tech works as promised, we’re about to enter a golden age of delicious RTD cold brew.

April 23, 2019

From $200 Bottles of Coffee to Wrist-Saving Espresso Machines: 8 Fascinating Things From Specialty Coffee Expo 2019

April 12th launched the 2019 Specialty Coffee Expo in Boston. As the leading industry event for the western hemisphere, there was no shortage of new gadgets and interesting products to discover—like $200 bottles of coffee, data-driven espresso machines and frozen coffee pods—all while caffeinated beyond reason.

Here are eight coffee tech innovations we loved seeing.

Third Wave Water’s Cafe-Sized Water Maker

Most coffee shops treat their water source to enhance coffee flavor and keep their equipment healthy. This usually involves reverse osmosis, then trying to add some minerals back into the water—but most of the time it’s terribly imprecise. Even with expensive commercial-grade gear, shops often find their water quality to be inconsistent and the coffee disappointing.

Third Wave Water (as seen on Shark Tank) solved this problem for home brewers a few years back with mineral packets designed to create the exact water mineral profile recommended by the Specialty Coffee Association. At the Expo, TWW finally unveiled their cafe-sized solution: the Tethys.

Designed for small to medium-size cafes, the Tethys can create precisely-mineralized water for up to 250 gallons per day.

Elemental Beverage Co’s $200 Bottle Of Coffee

Last year we wrote about IceColdNow’s electric chiller that could make cold coffee in seconds from any hot brew. The company has since rebranded to Elemental Beverage Co and expanded its ambitions.

Not only can cafes use the proprietary Snapchill Technology to insta-chill coffee, Elemental has upsized the tech and added a vacuum-sealer that allows the company to seal and preserve the coffee like wine.

You’ll soon find canned cold coffee on grocery store shelves, but more impressively, Elemental Beverage Co is also releasing limited-batch bottles of super high-end coffees. Graded at a score of 90+ (the top 0.1% of coffee beans in the world), these coffees are meant to be uncorked like a fine wine and enjoyed in fancy tasting glasses.

They popped one of these ~$200 bottles open on Sunday for a tasting. I was a few rows down and missed out. I’ve been mourning ever since, because everyone standing at the booth nearly 30 minutes after the tasting was still in shock at how tasty the coffee was.

Duvall’s Data-Driven Espresso Machine

Training baristas in specialty coffee shops involves a lot of writing. You write down each espresso shot’s time, yield, taste, and try to discern what kinds of recipes will produce good flavors. It’s a long, confusing process—largely because you can’t remember where you put your sheet of notes in-between customers.

Duvall’s new espresso machine doesn’t only store data from every shot pulled. It enables baristas to program precise recipes into the device, then uses volumetric measurements to make adjustments mid-shot if necessary to match that recipe.

Introducing data into the espresso machine has a variety of benefits that have never been possible before, like allowing coffee roasters to push out espresso recipes to all of their cafes at the same time, or enabling managers to see which baristas are the slowest at pulling shots, or helping trainers connect the dots between recipes and shot flavor for new hires.

La Marzocco’s Wrist-Friendly Espresso Machine (Finally)

There are many reasons baristas burn out (resulting in high employee turnover), but among the top of the list is the bodily wear and tear that comes with the job. Barista wrists, in particular, are subject to much abuse from twisting portafilters in and out of the espresso machine.

It took La Marzocco 20 years to come up with a solution to this problem, and they finally unveiled it this year: the KB90 espresso machine. The straight-in portafilter design is extremely fast to use and feels natural on the wrists.

As someone who experienced life-disrupting wrist pain when I was a barista, I can’t describe how happy it made me to slip the portafilter straight into the machine without having to twist or turn. This sets the new bar for cafe ergonomics.

Bellwether Coffee Roasted On-Site

Our friends at Bellwether were awarded the coveted Best New Product for Commercial Coffee or Tea Preparation & Serving Equipment this year—and we’re not surprised.

The ventless coffee roasters make roasting great coffee easier than it’s ever been in history (no, really). Nathan Gilliland, Bellwether’s CEO, helped me roast a batch myself and I was stunned at how simple it was. The coffee turned out incredible, too.

Nathan also showed me their ‘Tip The Farmer’ feature, which just went live a few weeks ago. With a tap on the tablet, I was able to send a $1 tip directly to a coffee producer (minus credit card fees, of course). Nathan hopes to integrate this feature with popular POS platforms in the coming months to help give consumers easier access.

Odeko’s Auto-Replenishing Scales And Software

With coffee shops being low-margin establishments, software and automation companies have largely steered clear from developing targeted solutions designed for the cafe. Odeko, however, is all-in with coffee shops.

Their new automated inventory management platform uses connected scales to track inventory and usage, creates predictive models, and then orders on the cafe’s behalf to ensure they never run out of cups / croissants / coffee / whatever.

Their booth was particularly striking, with a never-ending conveyor belt of coffee beans and oat milk that earned a double-take from every passerby.

Bonaverde’s Green-To-Cup Home Machine

It’s been a couple of years since our video review of the Bonaverde Roast-Grind-Brew coffee machine, so we checked back in at the Expo. Hans Stier, the founder and CEO, roasted and brewed a batch of coffee that had been picked just 72 hours prior to the event. It was certainly the freshest coffee I’ve ever tasted—and will probably ever taste again.

The machine has gone through some design iterations that make it easier to roast, grind, and brew modularly, without having to go through all three steps in one session. Hans is also looking to expand Bonaverde’s unroasted coffee offerings to US-based roasters, who can send their roast profiles and green beans to customers.

Frozen Coffee Concentrate That Actually Tastes Good

The hottest gossip of the Expo surrounded a new concept: frozen coffee extract in Keurig-compatible capsules. At first glance, Cometeer appeared to be just another pod distributor, but with a closer look, I realized they had some really big names on their capsules, like Counter Culture, George Howell, and Equator Coffee.

The idea is that Cometeer sends you frozen coffee extract pods by mail, you slip them into your freezer, and then you have on-demand coffee from well-known specialty roasters. You can pop the aluminum (fully recyclable) pod in your Keurig, or just rip off the top and mix with hot or cold water to bring it to a drinkable strength.

I was skeptical at first. Could frozen coffee concentrate really maintain its delicate flavor? The sample impressed me—sure enough, it was just as delicious as the freshly brewed coffee I’d tasted in ‘Roaster Village’ around the corner.

It’s difficult to say whether the shipped-frozen model will appeal to regular coffee lovers at home, but Cometeer definitely showed up strong in the eyes of industry professionals.

We loved seeing coffee being served in new and interesting ways (frozen pods, high-end cold brew), but the main coffee tech trend was clear: data.

Data for espresso machines. Data for roasters. Data for inventory and purchasing. Data for sourcing coffee. The coffee world, it seems, is finally embracing a higher-tech future.

See anything else fascinating or quirky at the Specialty Coffee Expo? Tell us in the comments or tweet us @thespoontech!

Bellwether Roaster in Firebrand Oakland CA

February 19, 2019

Bellwether’s Ventless Coffee Roasters Are Headed Across The US

Last April, Bellwether Coffee announced their new ventless coffee roaster designed to help cafes and grocery stores roast in-store without having to install complex ventilation systems. Ten months—and $10m in additional funding—later, roasters are finally showing up around the country.

Bellwether began distributing roasters to cafes in the Bay Area (where the company is located) in the last quarter of 2018. The idea was to start close to home to ensure those customers were having a great experience before expanding further away.

The feedback must have been positive, because the first device to leave the Bay Area ended up in Sump Coffee’s Nashville location late January.

In the coming months, Bellwether will have roasters set up in Austin, Portland, Denver, and New York as well, but with sales reps being hired for eight more cities, it’s only a matter of time before that list becomes much larger.

“From our standpoint, for a company that just announced its product in April, the floodgates feel like they’re opening now.” Nathan Gilliland, Bellwether CEO, told me when I asked what it would take increase demand for Bellwether roasters.

And it makes sense. There are thousands of cafes in the US alone that would love to roast their own coffee in-house, but when they look at the labor overhead, the ventilation required, and the training they need, it feels overwhelming. “That’s really where our pre-orders have come from: those folks who said they’re interested in roasting, but who feel overwhelmed by the usual route”.

Nathan says Bellwether doesn’t really consider itself as a competitor to traditional roaster manufacturers. They not stealing customers away from that kind of coffee roasting equipment. They’re not having people rip out older, chunkier roasters in exchange for Bellwether’s vending-machine-sized device. They’re adding roasting capabilities for the first time in places where it would have never been possible before.

“For all of our customers to date, there is no way that a traditional roaster could have been put in there. They’re in urban locations and multi-story buildings. No way they could get the right permits or do ventilation in those stores.”

Roughly 40% of Bellwether customers are small cafes. Another 40% are multi-location chains—many of them ordering more than one roaster. The goal is to put an end to the ‘hub-and-spoke’ model of roasting, where a single facility supplies beans to a wide area of cafes, by enabling each location to roast its own beans using the same roast profiles stored online. This engages customers of each location with the roasting process, as well as results in better consistency and freshness for each cafe.

The remaining 20% of Bellwether’s orders is a “large national grocery chain”. Nathan’s been teasing us on who this chain is for months now, but we’ll have to wait a little longer.

“We hope to do an announcement with them in a month or two,” he said. “It’s a large chain,” he teased, once again.

One thing Nathan’s thrilled to roll out in the next couple of months is the ‘Tip The Farmer’ feature. Cafe and grocery customers will be able to walk up to the Bellwether roaster and add a tip that goes directly to farmers, rather than just tipping their baristas.

With coffee farmers often receiving under $0.75/lb of coffee (sometimes much, much less), even just one in twenty-five customers tipping $1 can double a farm’s revenue per pound—a dramatic jump. Nathan hopes to have more data on how this feature can impact farmers and customer experiences in the coming months.

Bellwether’s not the only startup working toward ventless roasting technology. Roastery (formerly Carbine Coffee) is also working on a cloud-connected roaster that doesn’t require ventilation, and Nathan believes it’s only a matter of time before the big players in traditional roasting equipment, like Loring and Diedrich, also start working toward more user-friendly, portable gear that can fit in cafes and grocery stores.

February 13, 2019

Home Coffee Roasting Gear Is Booming, But Will It Last?

We’ve seen espresso machines sized down to fit home kitchens. We’ve seen pour over cones transition from a snooty barista tool to home coffee bar essential. And now, it seems, coffee roasting is undergoing a similar adaptation.

Home coffee roasters have existed for years, with Behmor, Hottop, and Gene Cafe leading the space (behind Grandma’s repurposed popcorn popper, of course), but a new wave of home roasting gear is making waves—and raising lots of money.

Back in 2013, over 2,000 backers raised $600,000 to bring the Bonaverde Berlin—an $800 home roaster and coffee maker combo device—to life (you can read our review here).In 2015, London-based Ikawa raised just over $200,000 to bring its app-controlled roaster to prosumer homes. The device pre-sold for $650, was released in 2017, and now sells for just over $1,000 at retail.

And more recently in 2018, IA Collaborative Ventures’ Kelvin raised $400,000 to make coffee roasting even simpler and more affordable for casual coffee lovers, with devices pre-sold for just $250. A few weeks later, the Singaporean Power Roaster raised another $50,000 with roasters for $280 a pop.

For those of us in the coffee industry, this home roasting gear boom is a bit surprising. Roasting coffee is far more complex than most consumers imagine. Getting hold of high-quality unroasted beans can be a challenge. After roasting the beans, you have to wait days for the beans to release carbon dioxide before they even taste good. And when you finally get a great flavor profile you’re proud of, it’s hard to produce a second time.

Can home roasters engage casual coffee lovers enough to make the growth we’re seeing sustainable, or is this another fad that consumers will grow tired of once they’re confronted with the hidden complexities of coffee roasting?

I interviewed Alex Georgiou, Ikawa’s Head of Marketing, to discuss how he sees this niche market evolving over the next few years.

“The global home roasting audience is all in different places,” he pointed out. Taiwan has a well-developed tradition of home roasting with low-tech tools. Europe’s traditional cafes still maintain the monopoly on coffee beans. And America has “really deep pockets of home roasting enthusiasts.”

But even in parts of the world where exploring new kinds of coffee experiences is commonplace, Alex admits that home roasters are still a very niche audience, largely because the equipment isn’t very intuitive. “For a lot of people it’s a little bit like wrestling with a vacuum cleaner in your garage. It’s hard to do well and it’s not really an enjoyable process.”

To combat this challenge, Ikawa ships six bags of green coffee beans with every Ikawa At Home roaster. When users open the app and pick a bean to start roasting, they then can choose from six roast profile options—each highlighting different flavors and aromas. “Even if you’ve never roasted coffee before, you’ll be able to get great results, and then you can explore that going forward.”

This eliminates the friction of sourcing green coffee and figuring out how to roast for the first time, but is it enough to get casual coffee lovers on board? At just over $1,000 for the Ikawa At Home, many in the industry have voiced concern that it’s priced too high to open the home roasting floodgates.

I also reached out to Dan Kraemer, Founder and Chief Design Officer at IA Collaborative and creator of the Kelvin roaster, to get a different perspective. Like Alex, Dan sees accessibility as the key to enabling demand for home roasting gear to grow.

“Consumers just need to know it’s an option,” Dan said when I asked what it’s going to take for roasting to go mainstream. “The complete roaster and green bean delivery solution we offer through Kelvin will make home coffee roasting super easy and accessible.”

The Kelvin is priced at just $249 for pre-orders and will be around $330 after devices ship this Spring—a significantly more affordable option for aspiring home roasters. Rather than allowing consumers to control every aspect of their roast profile via an app like the Ikawa At Home, Kelvin users simply turn a single dial on the device to set their roast time.

“You can create myriad combinations of flavors and profiles just by varying the amount of time that you roast the coffee,” Dan said. “It’s a very simple entry-point for people who’ve never roasted before.”

The standard Kelvin Starter Pack will ship with a single pound of green coffee, but most pre-order customers actually opted to order three to six pounds of coffee. Dan is confident that most Kelvin users will continue to use the Kelvin app to source coffees that are tailored to their taste and brewing preferences once they’ve gone through their initial bags.

Ikawa and Kelvin tackle the issue of home roasting differently, but there’s one belief they both share: fanatics are always finding new ways to explore the world of coffee, and roasting at home is the natural next step for millions of people around the world—they just need the right accessible equipment to start this next segment of their coffee journey.

We’re still in the early days of home roasting, and at this point, it’s hard to tell whether it’ll remain an activity for super-enthusiasts or if consumer-centric devices like the Ikawa At Home and Kelvin will be able to capture the attention of more casual coffee lovers.

December 19, 2018

Alpha Dominche Shuts Down: Is Commercial Coffee Tech Dead?

There’s a lot to say about how the Spinn Coffee Maker has failed its customers with a delay of nearly two years, but there’s still a chance that story will have a happy ending (fingers crossed, Michael). Customers of Alpha Dominche, a tech hardware startup that’s made waves in the specialty coffee industry, aren’t so lucky.

On December 4th, Alpha Dominche notified its customers that the company was halting all operations immediately with no goal of launching up again.

“This past year we have explored every reasonable option to continue our business operations, but were unable to secure the resources necessary to continue. We deeply regret any hardship this causes our partners, customers, and friends within the coffee and tea industries.”

The company recently crowdfunded over $230,000 to manufacture the Flask Coffee Brewer, a relatively simple manual coffee maker, but they won’t end up shipping a single product. No refunds or late arrivals.

But it’s far worse for the company’s commercial customers. Alpha Dominche’s flagship product that launched in 2014, the Steampunk, is—or, was—an eye-catching $15,000 coffee and tea brewer designed for high-end cafes. And soon they’ll all stop working.

Thousands of cafes around the world purchased a Steampunk for its stunning cylinder design, vacuum-sealed brewing process, and tablet-driven controls. Many of these cafes transformed their bar layouts, customer flows, and menus specifically to complement the Steampunk. It was supposed to usher in the future of precision coffee and tea brewing, enabling coffee shops to brew using recipes hyper-tailored to individual coffees at the click of a button.

Flask Brewer backers are out eighty dollars, Steampunk-wielding cafes around the world are about to have a useless hunk of metal when the official servers go down, and Alpha Dominche’s brand new cafe in Brooklyn has turned the lights off. Alpha Dominche was the tech darling of the specialty coffee industry, the innovator leading the way to a high-tech future for coffee shops.

We’ve seen coffee technology projects fail in the past, but not with a company as beloved and well-funded as this. What does it mean for coffee tech? Have we discovered the boundaries of financial viability, the limit to what the industry can afford? Will cafe owners ever learn to love tech again?

Businesses fall apart frequently for reasons other than their products, but even in the beginning, many in the coffee world wondered if the Steampunk would be a sound investment.

“For me, financial viability was never even a question for an existing cafe,” Umeko Motoyoshi, Head of Coffee at Sudden Coffee, told me (Note: I have done freelance writing for Sudden previously). The device was so expensive that it would only make sense to purchase if you were to develop your entire cafe around it, from barflow, to customer interactions, and even the menu. Before Sudden, Umeko spent a few years at Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, “there was no pain point that the Steampunk would have addressed for it to be worth it.”

Margins are notoriously low for coffee shops, but the story is different for roasters who own their own cafes. Profits tend to be significantly higher per beverage since they receive the beans at a much lower price point, and this allowed Oak Cliff Coffee in Dallas to have a more positive experience with their Steampunk. As Will Riggs, Client Experience Director, puts it: “As a roaster, there was price justification because it was used primarily for our single origin coffees, which have a higher margin.” The cafe eventually sunset their Steampunk due to repeat maintenance issues.

I’ll admit to being an early skeptic myself. As a former cafe manager, I couldn’t make sense of the numbers for our own small town shop, especially when a top-notch batch brewer would run less than 10% the cost of the Steampunk. A positive ROI simply didn’t seem realistic.

The BKON Craft Brewer is a ~$10,000 tea and coffee brewer that looks eerily similar to the Steampunk, though the underlying brewing technology is significantly different. When I spoke to BKON about Alpha Dominche’s closure, I was surprised by what I heard. Steampunk owners may be burned, but they aren’t traumatized by the recent news and trading in their cloud-connected brewers for manual pour over cones. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

“Cafe owners that were using the Steampunk aren’t looking to get out of coffee tech,” Dean Vastardis, one of BKON’s co-founders told me. “They’ve actually come to us looking for a way to fill the gap.”

But the question is still the same: can the coffee and tea industries really sustain expensive hardware like the BKON when margins are low and $1,500 batch brewers are already pretty good at making coffee?

Apparently, it can. Most of BKON’s Craft Brewers are located in smaller chains and independent coffee shops, and unlike Alpha Dominche, BKON doesn’t show any warning signs of closing down. In fact, they say they’re just getting started. Last year BKON launched the Storm brewer, a commercial-sized cold brewer utilizing the same vacuum technology and capable of producing up to 400 gallons of coffee or tea at a time.

The sudden closure of Alpha Dominche may have initially seemed like a sign of the end times for coffee innovators, but the coffee tech space doesn’t seem to be winding down. Flask backers will probably be more skeptical of future crowdfunding projects and some cafe owners may opt for less risky batch brewers, but the specialty coffee market as a whole isn’t finished with high-end coffee tech yet.