Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “MAKE @ Engadget Expand 2014: Poursteady”.
Good afternoon, i’m stefan and we are poor city, we’re making an automated pour over coffee machine that brings unprecedented speed, precision and reliability to commercial coffee retailers. My slides are not progressing um for those of you not familiar with pour over. It is essentially the japanese tea ceremony of coffee. It’S a slow process that prepare that involves preparing the grounds and controlling the temperature of the water and the server first must rinse the filter and then do a small pour allowing the grounds to bloom and then followed by a series of measured pours at regular intervals. Resulting in the best single cup of freshly brewed coffee, while the coffee is better, it’s a difficult process to replicate in a commercial setting.
For for a couple of reasons. The first is throughput a single barista, making a cup of coffee at a time it takes about three to five minutes. The second reason is consistency. A barista can make a perfect cup, but doing so all day long or training others to do it allows for the potential for a loss in quality. One of our founders mark sivanak, has been making pour-over coffees for himself at home for years. He and stuart hayes have collaborated on robotics projects for nasa and the navy for almost a decade, but when they started to talk about pour over, they realized it was kind of the perfect application for the automation technology. They were so familiar with, and poor study was born. I joined mark and stewart at the maker faire in 2013.. In two days we made over 800 cups of coffee to uh. Some really excited people. We knew that at that point that we had something more than just a project and started to put together the product and a company myself.
I’M a product designer and greg mihalko, a graphic designer and a creative director have since joined the project. Along with mark and stork, we have been working to make the robot a beautifully designed machine that would be right at home in coffee shops. Restaurants, events like this and offices – and this is the result we took. We took the machine back to the maker faire this year and we built a cart. That’S actually here in the toyota booth, so you can help yourself to a free cup of coffee over there and at the make for this year, we made over 900 cups of coffee on a single machine and brought home six blue ribbons and one coveted red during The past year, we first created an app that allows the barista to program the settings, including the pattern and the pore size and the amount of time between each pour.
This will make it easier on their bodies and, in the end, give them greater control and more consistent coffee going forward, we’ll be able to support different profiles for different cup sizes and different kinds of grounds, as well as integrate the machine with point of sale systems. On the analytics side, we already are collecting a lot of data about how our machines are being used, and we can imagine that businesses will find uses for that information as well. In the past few months, we have built our own hot water heater that can control temperature within a degree, and it has an adjustable flow rate. We’Ve also done a round of design for manufacturability bringing our bomb costs down, but still relying on industrial components that are rated for hundreds of thousands of cycles and we’ll be able to run daily for years on end.
We also proudly make this machine in brooklyn. We have our own cnc machine shop and we’re able to manufacture a lot of the parts ourselves uh in our facility. We can also assemble and test what everything that we make and if you can do this up to a few hundred units a year which may not sound like a lot. But it would be enough to keep us going um and by designing for an industry that can justify the costs of professional grade equipment. We can make better machines without compromising on the engineering or the build quality yeah. So it’s a good time to making coffee equipment.
The market for premium retail coffee in the united states is now 12 billion dollars and there’s over 20 000 retail coffees businesses, and we would be happy and successful if we sold our machines into every coffee shop that does pour over today, but real success. I think would be measured by our ability to actually bring pour over into the mainstream by providing the technology that kind of fixes the issues that have made that impossible until now, while still honoring the craft of pour over coffee because that’s important to everybody. Our next goal is to get a batch of our machines out into the world for testing. We have a couple locations lined up in brooklyn and we’re looking to sign up a few more. So if you got a coffee shop, come speak to me, um and after that our goal is to launch our product at the biggest coffee industry. Trade show in seattle in april and start taking orders from the rest of the world.
But that is going to take a lot of work between now and then so. In order to get there, we’ve launched our kickstarter. Today we have some great rewards, even if you’re not in the market, for a commercial coffee machine, but you should come check it out. Anyway and vote for us, thank you thanks very much.
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