Comment by goldenkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goldenkey | Hacker News Reader

Everyone here is criticizing Teforia but what about some of what they did right? I just ordered 2 classic infusers, because they built a machine that can accept their teas AND any looseleaf tea you buy, and brews it wonderfully, better than most of us could accomplish without overly babysitting the tea and using pressure devices like the french press. You will honestly not taste tea with as much flavor as the teaforia infuser extracts - thats a huge accomplishment. Their device didnt do any BS K-cup opening through sharp prongs, with a messy garbage bin. You simply scan the tea and dump it in the infuser. Honestly, I think the company may have issued a forclosure but through the sale volume with the discounts they are offering, the investors will be impressed and change their mind about teaforia. Sure, the initial prices were too high but there is a market for what teaforia created. Sometimes we have to stumble and rid ourselves of greed before we let our precious creations become more commoditized, ie cheaper. I forsee a 3rd party market for teaforias becoming pretty large if TeForia shuts down. The sips are cool but the device is really the magic.

> brews it wonderfully, better than most of us could accomplish without overly babysitting the tea and using pressure devices like the french press.

You say "overly babysitting", but which part of pushing the "170F" button on the $50 temperature controlled electric kettle with easy single-press presets and then twisting an egg timer is so hard that it needs another $950 and then special multi-dollar packets and, omfg, internet access to a cloud service? I agree with the other commenter. It definitely sounds like you work for Teforia. Also like you aren't thinking honestly about how easy it is to make tea.

I don't work for Teforia. I like their product. I love tea. A kettle doesn't control pressure, nor does it use a small volume of water. ie microbrewing. So with an egg timer you can control steep time and temperature but not much else and not very accurately. The taste is the difference, bitter vs flavorful.

I'll bet you the price of one of your machines that you won't be able to blind-taste the difference between how I brew a cuppa and your machine.

I don't know maybe you're just terrible at making tea the usual way but it doesn't have to be that way.

I believe there is a market for this on a small scale, a few employees building them bespoke and on demand. But not a venture backed scale startup.

It's possible that tea culture is significantly weaker than coffee culture in most of the globe. Unfortunately, changing culture to sell a product is terribly hard - Starbucks did accomplish something similar though. I really would like to see tea, quality tea made using pressured microbrewing like Teaforia does, come into the mainstream. Its a huge travesty that you get a paper teabag at Starbucks meanwhile coffee gets made to such a precision and premium degree.

The tea culture definitely isn't weaker than coffee culture on the worldwide stage, not to a meaningful extent anyway.

One important difference is that tea never had the kinds of accessibility problems that coffee had. Specifically, the kinds of accessibility problems that technology solves, because you can get a very good cup of tea with just attentive steeping.

With coffee, you more or less need hardware of some kind, so it's a question of how fancy that hardware is. With tea, the base case is either a teabag or loose leaf in a cup/pot.

Microbrewing is very different than normal hot water brewing and steeping. Teforia also applies a pressure which has a different effect.

Not to say tea is hard to make but if you want that extra bit of flavor, the pressure driven microbrew really makes a difference.

The main difference is that some of the most popular ways of preparing coffee are only possible to do well with relatively expensive equipment, whereas you can prepare the finest teas with a £10 kettle and mug infuser. You can't compare a product like this to a $1000 espresso machine: it's more like buying a $1000, cloud-connected french press.

I wouldn't purchase it for $1000 either. The clearance sale price is only $200 which is well worth it in my opinion.

IMHO the best devices for tea to date are those little spring-loaded double mesh hemisphere tea infusers. That said, at the reduced price I may have bought a couple of the Teforias, one to pull apart and one for my dad who is a tea fiend, but they apparently only ship within the US.

I believe the tea pot is also rather good.

Tea pots are good for heating water, but not the best for steeping tea.

No, no. Kettles are for heating water.

I stand corrected, you are right!

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