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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Nitro

uKeg Nitro Cold Brew Maker Blasts Past Kickstarter Goal

Summertime is cold brew season, and no cold brew is trendier than nitro cold brew.

Nitro cold brew is essentially cold brewed coffee infused with nitrogen gas and dispensed out of a tap. The result is smooth, lightly-carbonated beverage that drinks like Guinness, and is now so ubiquitous that you can find it at Starbuck’s nationwide.

Since it requires nitrogen gas and a tap, one place you can’t typically find nitro cold brew is in somebody’s home. But uKeg Nitro, a new device on Kickstarter from Portland, OR-based company GrowlerWerks, is aiming to change that. The device lets at-home baristas brew, store, and pour nitro cold brew coffee on their countertop.

To brew, users can either brew their own cold brew in the keg itself or just fill it with pre-made cold brew coffee. Charge the keg cap with Nitro gas, let the pressure build to desired carbonation level, shake to infuse the gas throughout, and that cold brew is ready to pour. The homemade nitro cold brew will stay fresh and carbonated for two weeks.

Suggested retail price for the uKeg Nitro is $199. Early backers can get it for $169, along with two Nitro gas chargers, four coffee filter bags, a coffee funnel and a drip mat. Considering that nitro cold brew often goes for at least $5 a pop at trendy coffee shops, the uKeg Nitro could actually pay for itself in just one summer (though you still have to buy the coffee beans themselves).

Clearly I’m not the only one intrigued by GrowlerWerks’ new product. The uKeg Kickstarter launched on June 5th and reached its $75,000 goal within 90 minutes. At the time of this writing, the uKeg has raised just over $262,000 with one month left to go.

As cold brew rises in popularity, companies large and small are husting to provide solutions to make it at home. PicoBrew has cold brew capabilities for the Pico Z and Pico C. Cuisinart and Dash have devices that will let you make a cup of cold brew — which typically takes at least 12 hours — in just 30 minutes (with varying degrees of success).

I never quite got why people would pay for a device to make cold brew when it’s so easy to do at home: cover ground coffee with water, let sit overnight, and boom — cold brew. (Maybe that’s why the Gravity Cold Brew Coffee Maker failed to meet its Kickstarter goal.) However, the uKeg Nitro adds an extra benefit that most people couldn’t DIY: the creamy fizziness of nitro. Its booming Kickstarter shows that there’s clearly consumer demand for more accessible, affordable nitro cold coffee, especially as summer rolls in.

GrowlerWerks is aiming to ship the uKeg Nitro in early October of this year. As always with crowdfunded hardware projects, there’s a risk that the uKeg won’t meet that October ship date — or even ship at all. However, GrowlerWerks already launched their original uKeg product (for beer, not coffee) on Kickstarter in 2014, which raised over $1.5 million.

While they had a few production hiccups, hopefully GrowlerWerks can leverage the lessons they’ve learned over the past three years — as well as their existing manufacturing partners — to make sure the same problems don’t happen with the uKeg Nitro.

RISE Brewing Co. Blends 3 Major Coffee Trends into One Canned Latté

Cold brew is cool. Oat milk is hot (in the metaphorical sense). Put them together, add some nitrogen, and you’ve got the buzzy concoction that is Rise Brewing Co’s nitro cold brew cans.

Founded in 2014 in New York City, Rise Brewing Co. was originally a few friends who started hawking kegs of nitro cold brew — that is, cold brewed coffee charged with nitrogen to make it rich and creamy, like Guinness — to local restaurants. Soon they started rolling out the kegs into office kitchens, and in 2016 started canning their brews and selling them through retailers along the East Coast. In May of this year they started selling their cans via Amazon.

According to COO Melissa Kalimov, Rise Brewing Co. is the U.S.’s first shelf-stable nitro cold brew. The cans have a widget at the bottom very similar to the one in a Guinness can, which replicates the nitro beer experience (and gives you the *crack* — hisssssss sound when you pop the top). See the video below for the full sound experience. (Apologies for the low quality, I took the video one-handed.)

Cold brew has also been experiencing a boom these past few years: it has more caffeine and less acid than hot coffee, so it gives you a stronger buzz and less of a stomachache. From 2015 to 2017, cold brew sales grew by a whopping 370% to $38.1 million.

And while products like the Gravity Cold Brewer, the Dash Cold Brew Coffee Maker, and the PicoBrew Z Series let you make your own cold brew at home, adding nitro to the mix is outside most home barista’s skillset. Nitro certainly isn’t necessary to get the cold brew buzz, but it is pretty tasty: it’s smooth, creamy, and has a frothy head — sort of like iced coffee meets Guinness. Many coffee shops have hopped on the nitro trend, including Starbucks, who put nitro cold brew on tap in 2015.

In addition to their original black brew, Rise Brewing Co. also has a few more adventurous flavors. Last summer they launched two new cold brew options, one mixed with lemonade and the other blood orange juice. In August of this year, the company launched their nitro latté line, with both traditional and oat milk options. “With so many cold brew coffee makers coming into the space, we wanted to show ourselves as innovators,” said Rise co-founder and CEO Grant Gyesky.

Photo: Specialty Coffee Association/Square.

Bringing oat milk into the mix was a smart choice for Rise Brewing Co.. The 2018 Square Coffee Report released last month showed that oat milk is the third most popular alternative milk in the U.S., but that could soon change — sales have increased by 425 percent since June 2017. Oat milk also has less separation and, in this ex-barista’s opinion, goes better with coffee than almond or soy milk. Plus, it won’t affect people with nut or soy allergies.

I had the opportunity to try the brew out for myself and let me tell you, it’s pretty darn good. There’s a distinct oatmeal flavor to the oat milk latte, but I actually liked it — and as someone who’s lactose intolerant, I could drink it without a stomachache. (I’d recommend skipping the more adventurous Lemon and Blood Orange cold brew, however.) The one problem is that it’s almost too easy to drink: the creaminess makes it go down smooth, so you can end up drinking one super-fast and not realize it until the jitters kicked in.

Rise cold brew cans retail from $2.99 to $3.49, which is cheaper than a cold brew from your local coffee spot (at least in urban areas). Add the portability aspect — and the fact that you don’t need to keep them chilled — and Rise Brewing Co. is a great option for caffeinating on the go, or keeping on hand for the mid-afternoon office lull.

Apparently, other people think so, too. The company raised $2.3 million in July of this year, bringing their total funding to $4.9 million. Let’s see if they can keep milking the coffee trends.

Meet U-Bruu, The Latest Take On The Modern Home Kegerator

Back when I was a kid, my dad converted an old fridge in our garage into a kegerator that served both beer and soft drinks from small minikegs he’d buy from a local distributor. While I was too young to consume the beer, I downed frosty mugs of cold Coca-Cola and root beer and became convinced a fridge that served up draught beverages was maybe the coolest invention ever conceived.

As an adult, I still think a home draught serve system is a very good idea. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have an extra fridge laying around. But the good news is we live in a golden age of beverage serving innovation that continues to bring us new ways to take simple cans or bottles of our favorite beverage and serve it up pro-style.

The latest take on the modern home serving machines is the U-Bruu, an interesting new spin on home draught machines that can not only serve up most any beverage on tap, but can also infuse the drink with nitrogen or CO2 and any number of ‘flavor enhancers.’

The U-Bruu has an inner chamber that allows the user to connect store-bought bottles or growlers of their favorite beverage and inverts them, ready to dispense. The system can fit up to twelve 12 ounce bottles of beer, eight sparkling wine bottles or four growlers.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the U-Bruu is the flavor infusion system. The system allows the user to use “flavor enhancers” to add flavors such as bacon, peach or peanut butter to the drinks. The U-Bruu will include a recipe book for special drink mixes such as coconut infused coffee or bacon flavored beer.

I’m also intrigued by the nitro/CO2 infuser capability of the U-Bruu. Being a fan of nitro coffee, I like the idea of doing it at home without weird contraption and also avoiding paying my local Starbucks $5 a glass.

The U-Bruu is the latest in a wave of interesting new home drink dispensing systems that have come to us via crowdfunded startups over the past few years. One of the earliest was the Synek system, which launched in June 2014. Then came Fizzics, which allowed users to turn any single can or bottle and promised draught-like foam. Last year we saw the Growler Chill, a system to create a tap-serve system for growlers.

While we’ve seen strong interest in home beer making startups like PicoBrew and MiniBrew the last few years, the reality is more people would prefer to skip the hard work of making a fermented beverage and get to the drinking part.  Luckily for us, nowadays we don’t have to convert our fridge to a kegerator to get a pro-style serve at home.

The U-Bruu, which is available for pre-order via Kickstarter, is expected to ship in October to backers and has already surpassed its funding goal of $39,000.

Here’s The Most Exciting New Coffee Tech Of 2017

Ready for a jolt of innovation with your morning caffeine fix? Good thing, because 2017 looks like it could serve up a double shot of disruptive coffee technology.

Due to a combination of emerging taste trends, technologies, and good timing, 2017 is shaping up to be an exciting year in the world of coffee. Here are the products that I’m most intrigued about:

Spinn Coffee

(Update: Read my November 2017 update on the status of Spinn here). Spinn Coffee is a San Francisco startup that is expected to ship its centrifugal brewing system this summer to early backers.  The Spinn coffee maker uses the same centrifugal technology that Nespresso uses in its Vertuoline coffee and espresso maker line (Nespresso licenses the technology from Spinn), only instead of creating a centrifuge within the pod, the Spinn uses its patented technology within an internal centrifuge system.

The new machine will grind whole beans for each cup and brew the consumer’s choice of espresso or drip coffee. The centrifuge spins the brewing coffee spins at a high rate within the chamber to extract flavors from the ground coffee beans.

As would be expected from a modern coffee maker, the Spinn is connected and app-controllable. The company is also working to develop a coffee marketplace that delivers beans from local roasters. While the first batch of Spinns is sold out, the company has made a second batch available for preorder that is expected to ship in the second half of this year.

Spinn - The key to the Best Cup of Coffee

Bonaverde Berlin Roast-Grind-Brew Machine

(Update: You can see our November 2017 video review of the Bonaverde Berlin here). Bonaverde is one of the connected kitchen’s longest running crowdfunding sagas, having raised funding for its roast-grind-brew coffee machine back in 2013. While over two years late, the company finally started to ship to beta testers (aka Kickstarter backers) and are fine-tuning the product for a broader release.

The Bonaverde Berlin is a unique idea and will test just how far coffee lovers will go for a unique cup of coffee. While the home coffee roasting movement has picked up steam in recent years, the typical method for home roasting is to use a dedicated home roaster.  By combining roast-grind-brew into one single device, the Berlin will certainly provide extra convenience and space savings for those interested in home roasting, but it’s too soon to tell how many average consumers are willing to go this far for a unique and fresh cup of coffee.

The Berlin, which will be available to non-Kickstarter backers at the end of this year, will run for $800 or more at retail. The device requires its own special filters to mask the roasting smell as well as – at least initially – that you purchase the coffee pouches from the company that can cost between $1 and $5.  Consumers will eventually be able to insert their own beans to roast, but for now users of the Bonaverde will need to buy their green coffee through the Bonaverde curated marketplace.

You can watch a CNET video review of the product below.

Seva Coffee

In many ways, Seva is a similar concept to the Bonaverde Berlin in that it has created a roast-grind-brew machine that starts with green coffee beans and delivers a full cup of coffee, but the main difference being that Seva uses a proprietary capsule system. The capsules, which are compostable (unlike traditional Keurig based pod system), will allow the user to create a single cup of coffee, unlike the Bonaverde system which brews between 5 and 8 cups with a pouch of their coffee.

Pricing and availability for the Seva Coffee machine are currently not available.

Dash Cold Brew Coffee Machine

While companies like Toddy have enabled consumers to make cold brew coffee at home for decades, a recent surge in interest in the low-acidity coffee brewing method has some wondering if there’s a faster way to make coffee than the usual 8 to 12 hours required for a cup of cold brew.

Enter Storebound, the company behind the PancakeBot and the SoBro connected coffee table. The company showed off a prototype of its Dash Rapid Cold Brew Coffee Maker at the Housewares Show, a device that is expected to short cut the process of cold brew coffee to 10 minutes.  According to Digital Trends Jenny McGrath, the Dash Cold Brew machine uses something called ““cold boil” and lots of filtration.”

Storebound isn’t the first company to take a swing at a quick cold brew machine. First Build, the incubation group for GE that created the Paragon precision cooker, had a fast cold brew prototype called the Prisma that it came about $3 thousand short of funding on Indiegogo last fall, which caused them to put the brakes on development.

Chime Chai Tea Maker

Ok, so admittedly I’m cheating here by including a chai maker, but hey, who doesn’t like chai tea? The Chime connected tea maker, which is expected to start shipping later this year, uses a pod-based system that allows you to brew a highly optimized cup of chai.

Jacked-Up Nitro Cold Brew Keg System

Since so many us like our beer to taste like coffee, it’s only natural that we’d eventually have coffee that tastes like beer.  Or, at the very least, coffee that has a Guinness-like head in the form of nitrogen-injected coffee.

While nitro-injected coffee has been gaining in popularity in recent years, it’s still hard to find unless you live near an adventurous coffee bar. But don’t worry, you can always make nitro-coffee at home if you’re willing to try some of the early nitrogen coffee makers such as the Jacked-Up Nitro. The system, which is available online through a home brew specialty retailer, is available today for $230 and looks fairly straightforward to operate.

However, being the tech nerd that I am, I’m still on the hunt for a home nitro system that is connected and doesn’t require me to go to a home brew specialty shop. Who knows, maybe there’s an innovative startup (hint hint) that will create one that I include in my top coffee tech list of 2018.

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