Does it dispense directly into the cup or into a bag?
I know some people leave their tea in their cup the whole time they're drinking, but I find it's really best to control steeping time and limit it to a few minutes.
Thanks Daniel. teaBOT makes your perfect blend and mixes the hot water and leaves in the cup. The filter lid keeps the leaves out of your mouth, but you're right it doesn't stop steeping. It's fine in most cases but we are working on a solution for the next generation :)
You go to the expense of buying loose leaf tea and then leave the leaves in to steep for >5min which basically makes teabags taste better because you can remove them and you can get quality tea in teabags nowadays (not just fannings and dust). I know different types of tea need different length of steeping but no black tea can survive longer than 5 mins. The reason you can still drink tea that was steeped longer when you make it in a cup is because the temperature in an open mug goes down very quickly. In your setup with a closed mug it's going to be even worse.
As somewhat of a tea addict (I just bought a kg of loose leaf tea last week) I think this sounds like a great product. I actually watched the video not expecting much, and I was pleasantly surprised by it's features and interface. If you ever make a home version, and I stop being a poor student, I would definitely be interested in something like that.
Personally, My one complaint would be about the selection, I'd like to see more types of tea/specific regions (Darjeeling, Assam, etc.) relative to the amount of 'additives'. But that's probably just me being a tea snob :). Is the selection up to the owner of the premise, or do you decide the stock for them?
That's great feedback. Thank you. I hope you can come try it for yourself but I'm glad you liked the video. We're open to suggestions regarding selection. We've already replaced several less popular ingredients and will continue to listen to our customers.
No plans for a home unit yet, but we let you order your favourite blends online to enjoy at home.
Excellent point about allowing the venue to select ingredients. We have allowed them to create a house blend, but no venue has requested ingredients yet.
I think this is for grab and go - they have a variety of huge ready made filter coffee flasks in many US cafes / universities. It's not the same as a gourmet artisan well made timed tea... but I really hope that it improves the general awareness of tea in general.
I'm not an employee of the company, I'm just a huge tea nerd.
Thanks for the feedback! Right now we have 18 ingredients per machine. But I must say, more variety is a common request. We stock what's popular and curate our selection based on user feedback. So please keep it coming.
It sounds and looks really cool. Although I see most of the coverage has been US orientated. Do you have a rough estimate of when you'd be likely to launch in the UK?
The UK is an exciting opportunity! Do you think it will fit well there? I know tea in general is very popular there.
Let's talk offline about our expansion plan.
Tea is popular, but mostly blended tea from teabags, served with milk. If you ask for "tea" with no qualifiers this is what you will get. High quality tea is hard to find in offline shops. I do like good tea, but I mostly drink teabag tea with milk because of the cost and convenience, and I don't see how any tea robot can win on those features.
One important factor that Americans might miss is the ubiquity of electric kettles. We run 230V nominal (in practice still 240V) mains, and 3KW kettles are standard, so boiling water is much faster than it would be in the US.
Yes, I think many people prefer loose leaf tea to traditional tea bags.
It was a challenge to heat the water quickly on 120V, but I think we have a good system. It not only provides instant hot water, but also allows you to adjust water temperature.
I think you would have a much harder job promoting your product in the UK. Tea in my experience is something you might have instead of a glass of water - always produced with a teabag, which is very cheap, and with consistent taste (it's not something you drink for the experience, it's something that's part of your daily routine). It's not something you'd go out to drink (quite unlike coffee), and many people will have never had loose leaf tea. Every house will have a kettle, although it might not be used for tea.
There's also no real value in (say) a company offering highly premium tea to their workers - specifically although there is a bit of a hierarchy with tea (Basics, PG Tips, Yorkshire, Twinings (which specifically tastes different in America, so far as I can work out)), if you grab a big box of Yorkshire Tea (<5p per tea bag, less if you buy in bulk) no one has any reason to complain, and the picky person will bring their own tea to work.
This is quite unlike coffee, where there's a big trend towards hipstery coffee shops.
I'll definitely check out your machine the next time I'm in Palo Alto!
I know some people leave their tea in their cup the whole time they're drinking, but I find it's really best to control steeping time and limit it to a few minutes.