To compete with the Starbucks and Second Cup's of the world, tea purveyors and new tea lounges need to use the extensive array of tea we stock in our stores to create a repetiore of drinks that rival and surpass any of the afore mentioned coffee chains. The Teapresso is the only machine I currently know of that can take your loose leaves and turn it into a strong, concentrated, versatile tea shot, thus allowing you to create any number of hot or cold beverages in under a minute. If you know of another way to acheive this without using quadruple the amount of tea, I would love to know.

After much experiamentation with various leaf sizes, cuts, grades and varieties of loose tea and infusions, I came the the realization that the design of the porta filter needed some adjustment to accomodate loose leaf effectively. Ideally, the tea needs to be mulched to expedite the extraction process. Full leaf did not produce a strong enough shot in the few minutes of time you have to get the drink into the customers hands.

Mulched tea on the other hand, does allow the operator to produce a drink in the 45-60 second range. The problem I ran into though, when I did mulch loose leaf tea, is it would clog the holes in the bottom of the diffuser plate inside the porta filter.

Minute grains of tea would embed themselves in the holes of the diffuser, expand from the hot water and completly block the openings, rendering the tea shot pretty much useless. It will actually push small grains of tea right through the porta filter and into your shot glass. You can see the holes in the diffuser plate in this pic:

During the testing phase, I was spooning 2 teaspoons of loose leaf into a mini grinder (the same ones used at home for grinding coffee beans)and mulching it for 3-5 seconds. The results would vary from tea to tea. I should tell you that all the CTC teas that I used in the porta filter work extremely well - no pre-mulching, no clogging, and a strong, clean tea shot resulted.

So, the only real solution for us loose tea afficianado's was to revamp the inside of the porta filter so that it would accomodate various grain sizes of tea and not clog. I posed this dilemma to Klub in Taiwan and within a few months, they sent over a prototype of a screen insert that screws into the porta filter. The diffuser plate is removed. The screen prevented tiny tea grnules to embed themselves into the holes and clog. Here is a picture of the screen they sent:

KLUB NT2 Teapresso

The Teapresso debuted at the 2007 Atlanta World Tea Expo last month and by all accounts, it was a runaway success. Over the past 10 years, I have exhibited at dozens of trade shows and rarely do I see the energy and excitement that was hovering around booth 609. Initially, my intentions were to stop by and help out if needed, but there was such a buzz around the booth, that my Taiwanese counterparts were swamped with interest and a lot of great questions.

Chai Baba has one of the few teapresso's in North America that is operating in a busy teahouse environment, so everybody wanted to know if it was living up to it's reputation as being the machine that will could invigorate our industry. The answer was, unequivocally....YES!

I am in love with this machine. I am not kidding when I tell you that at least 6 years prior, I was using an espresso machine to attempt extracting tea shots through the porta-filter. The results were mediocre at best. I remember thinking that some day, someone will invent a machine designed with the perfect time/temp/pressure to extract the essence out of tea as well as as an espresso machine draws it out of ground coffee. So, here we are, 6 years later in 2007 and such a machine is now available to the tea cafe industry in North America.

I'd like to draw a comparison between teahouses opening today and the typical coffee house 20 years ago. There were few espresso machines in these establishments back then. Today, if you open a coffee house without one of these machines, you would be considered mad by your counterparts! Chances are, you would be out of business before you ever got rolling. The cornerstone of your business and the prime profit center in your teahouse will not be the chipped brown betty, nor a $50.00 German glass handcrafted tea press, but the drink program that will arise from the use of a teapresso.

We launched our summer iced tea exlixirs at Chai Baba a few weeks back. I have never been able to produce iced drinks of this calibre from the conventional methods of brewing tea. For example, one of our drinks takes 2 table spoons of ground yerba mate (about .20 cents). We push it through the teapresso, pour over ice in a shaker, add a shot of a flower essence (our recipes are proprietary), a few ounces of rice milk, shake and pour into a glass. The reaction from our customers confirms that this drink is nothing short of extraordinary!

The reality is, none of this would be possible without the teapresso. I've come to the realization that in the last few months, purveyors and servers of loose leaf teas, who incorporate a unit into their establishments create a drink repertoire that is pretty much endless and limited by your own imagination.
The experimenting phase is so much fun!

Drop me a line if you want to ask me a few more questions, or go to my catalogue on the provided link and you will see more info on the Teapresso unit.

I look forward to helping you bring your tea house / coffee bar into the 21st century!

We are now into our third week here at Chai Baba with the Teapresso.
Our sales of tea lattes have risen substantially and we have also realized the we can make ALL brewed teas through the unit - no more dunking infuser balls and tea-sacs.
As well, the shots can be poured over ice to make a fresh brewed iced tea.

Think of this common scenario:

A patron walks into your tea store and picks one of the hundred or so offerings of loose leaf tea from your shelf. She says that she would like this iced & to-go.
What do you do?

Tell her that this is not the iced tea of the day and have her walk out? or,
figure out how to take the dry leaves from the container, brew them, ice them and get the resulting beverage into her hands pretty quick.
So where do you start?

For years, I used a tea press with double the leaves and half the water. To expedite the steeping, I would slowly push the plunger up and down 8-10 times over a 3 minute period. I would have my cup full of ice waiting.
This was the way I used to do it.
~now
The teapresso produces a stronger, more concentrated shot and mimics the versatility of espresso in many ways - except the possibilities with tea/infusions are infinite.
Drop 2 scoops of tea into the porta filter, push the programmed button, walk away and get your glass of ice ready. 1 minute later come collect your shot, pour over ice, hand to the customer and off she goes.
I would also like to point out that Customers who were consuming tea lattes before the teapresso arrived have said the drinks are now significantly better.

The Teapresso opens up the doors for teahouses and tea bars to create an endless array of drinks that are all tea or infusion based and, DO IT quickly!
The tea bar can now compete drink for drink with the hippest coffee bars.
Isn't this what we all are trying to achieve?

Hey, it's an asset we all could use.
happy sippin'
BW