If you make tea every morning, there’s a good chance you’re wasting energy by either filling your kettle with more water than you need, or making the water too hot for your particular tea.
That’s part of the pitch from BRÜ, a dedicated tea-making appliance currently nearing the end of its Kickstarter campaign. The BRÜ is a countertop device that brews tea at the temperature you want and steeps it for as long as you want before dispensing it directly into your cup. It works with both loose leaf and tea bags, so there are no pods or any special equipment required.
Even if you aren’t a tea snob who insists that their oolong is brewed at precisely 190 degrees for flavor, an advantage to the BRÜ seems to be the aforementioned reduction in energy usage. Because you tell the BRÜ exactly how much tea to create and what temperature, you won’t overfill a kettle, thereby heating excess water, and you won’t use a brute force boil water when a slightly lower temperature is needed for more delicate teas. Multiply those tiny bits of savings for daily tea drinkers over the year and that could have a real impact.
We’ve been down the precision tea brewing road before, though, with the Teforia, which promised granular levels of control for tea heads. But with a whopping $1,499 price tag, the Teforia never caught on with the masses and shut down after two years. BRÜ doesn’t have that champagne budget problem however, as Kickstarter backers can pick up a standard BRÜ machine for $96, or the BRÜ Plus, which has a self-cleaning feature, for $115.
The BRÜ has just four days to go in its campaign and has already zoomed past its goal of $30,128 to raise more than $420,000. But savvy crowdfunders know that raising a ton of money isn’t the same as getting to market. Making the leap from prototype to mass production has foiled other crowdfunded hardware projects like the Rite Press and iGulu, leaving those backers high and dry.
As with any Kickstarter project, it is buyer beware. But if you’re a big tea drinker looking for a small way to help the planet, the BRÜ might be for you.
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