Most people who drink tea use an electric kettle to quickly make hot water. Some even use an automatic tea maker, which lets you steep tea leaves while maintaining the ideal brew temperatures for each kind of tea. The ChaiBot works much like the latter devices, but adds the ability to make frothy matcha tea and chai to give you a more versatile kitchen companion.
No, it’s not as compact as your standard Breville automatic tea maker. In fact, this one’s pretty big, coming in at 14.4 x 12.2 x 6.7 inches (height x width x depth). For the hassle, though, you get an appliance that can make, pretty much, any kind of hot tea, matcha, or chai, complete with the ability to clean itself for minimum maintenance needs.
The ChaiBot kind of looks like a fancy drip coffeemaker, with a steeping chamber on the upper side and a removable kettle where the tea is transferred once the brewing is finished. To use it, simply fill up the water tank on the left side, put your ingredients in the steeping chamber, and choose your brew mode and recipe using the touchscreen on the right. From there, the device will handle everything else, boiling the water to the required temperature and maintaining it, while extracting all the flavor from the tea. According to the outfit, it uses a more efficient extraction technology that allows it to draw out 99.8 percent of tea molecules, so you can get more flavorful brews.
It’s also fast, with the outfit claiming the ability to properly steep teas in as little as three minutes after the water has started boiling. That means, no long waits to enjoy a cup of tea, as you can simply start the brew and get a jug full of the good stuff in a jiffy. Do note, the three-minute steeping is only done for two cups or less, with the appliance steeping a bit longer for larger volumes.
The ChaiBot can make anywhere from one to six cups of tea at a time, with the ability to choose the volume using the same onboard touchscreen display. The device comes with three main modes, Tea, Matcha, or Chai, complete with the option to choose different kinds of tea, so it can tailor the steeping temperature and duration to what each kind requires. Oh yeah, you can adjust settings on the fly, so you can steep for longer or brew at a higher temperature if you’re not sold on the default settings. When making matcha or chai, by the way, the device will prompt you to add milk to the jug, which it will automatically warm using the heating plate at the bottom.
Hate cleaning up? This could be your perfect appliance, as it comes with a self-cleaning setting, which you can bring up from the touchscreen. Do note, you will need to put detergent on the steeping chamber when cleaning, which is the extent of any actual work you’ll need to do.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for ChaiBot. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $175.