TeaBOT (YC S15) Makes Customized Cups of Tea with the Touch of a Button | Hacker News Reader

TeaBOT (YC S15) Makes Customized Cups of Tea with the Touch of a Button

blog.ycombinator.com

46 pointskatm57 comments

Thanks Kat! Hi HN, I'm one of the founders of teaBOT and I'm happy to answer questions you might have about our tea robot!

Rehman

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 :)

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.

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.

You must've seen this coming.

What do you do with teas that require a hot water rinse first, such as most chinese green teas?

sigh I suppose it's probably unrealistic to hope for separate first-flush and second-flush Darjeeling blends...

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.

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.

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!

You may also want to consider answering questions at reddit.com/r/tea, which is fairly active.

Or you could just buy a Sage Tea Maker and keep it on your desk/in your kitchen (hint: I did, it works great):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sage-Heston-Blumenthal-Maker-Litre/d...

(They're available in the USA but in a reversal of the normal state of affairs they cost more than in the UK. Oh, and Amazon.co.uk aren't the cheapest retailer for them; just the first that came to hand.)

That's not really the same thing, you are comparing a fancy hot water pot with an automated tea maker that holds actual tea and can blend it in individual cups.

Producing hot water at the right temperature is not the complex part here, in the Far East people have been using water boilers that keep a set temperature for ages. It's in every home and every office.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00133WML8/

You didn't read the specs on the Sage Tea Maker; it has a motorized infusion basket and can be programmed for different infusion times, whether to immerse once or repeatedly dip, and different brew temperatures. Not just a "fancy hot water pot".

I'm a big tea drinker and would love to see more high quality loose teas available for grab & go. However, I would not be as likely to use TeaBOT if I couldn't use my own reusable cup. Do you have any plans to produce and/or market reusable cups to work with the machine, with the (seemingly) popular filter lid?

(I'd also rather be able to control the steeping time, but I get that that's hard to manage in a to go situation.)

Amazing feedback! We hope to allow reusable travel mugs (not yet though). We've been debating this internally, but it's great to hear it from a customer. Would you (or do you) carry a travel mug?

Yes, I do carry a travel mug - specifically one with a removable filter for loose tea. (I actually also have a model where the internal loose-tea-holding-pod can be retracted from the water with a little lever! I think that one's made by Aladdin.)

The university campus where I work, and the city I live in, are both extremely pro-reusable cup, and most places give you a small discount when you use one too.

(ETA Ugh it looks like this thread got killed, annoying.)

Great feedback; thanks. May I ask what city you'd suggest this for?

Canadian west coast! Vancouver & Victoria.

Perfect. We love it there. We've already been scoping it out if you check our Twitter feed :)

Tea bags on strings make steeping time really controllable.

There are pack-your-own tea bag systems too here in the UK but I think most people would rather just have something good/familiar rather than blend their own weird tea.

I tried this at Coupa Cafe. It's really clever. The lid in the cup has a filter, so it can brew while staying inmediate and portable.

I got Earl Grey + Lavender. Cheap and great. I kept the filter lid :)

Is it still at Coupa? I would love to try it.

Yes it is.

Yes, the Coupa Café in downtown Palo Alto. Let us know where else you'd like to see a teaBOT and thanks for trying it!

Thanks! So glad you enjoyed it. Lavend-Earl is on our popular blends page.

I just tested the bot at Coupa Café in Palo Alto. I'm from Colombia, and all my colombian credit cards were decined but at the end, my local CC was accepted. I took a pic: https://instagram.com/p/5h993iw_hk/ and I was very happy. I'm a tea geek, and I loved the concept. Wish you the best, guys !!

@tifis

Thank you for the feedback. We're so glad you enjoyed it! Sorry it didn't accept your Colombian credit card. We'll work on it. I know it accepts Apple Pay if that helps.

Teabot is awesome! The Tea is fantastic, and the little touches like the filter lids make it delightful!

Rooibos + Bamboo + Lavender = :)

Thanks James! I can't say I've even tried that combination yet. I'll try it today :)

Ottawa needs a Teabot. I may just need to buy 10 square feet of high-traffic space :)

Toronto's not far away ;) But I agree, the nation's capital deserves a teaBOT.

How do you remove the tea in order to prevent over-brewing? It seems like you are highlighting tisanes, which can pretty much be brewed forever. Almost all actual tea (Camellia sinensis) needs to be brewed for a specific amount of time otherwise it can taste bitter.

gotta chug the tea, it's grab and go and chug!

you can't really chug hot liquids...

We're catering to the grab-and-go market. Our current machine doesn't address this but we're working on it.

I just want to go up to it and say: "Tea. Early Gray. Hot."

Can I do that? :-)

You may not be able to, but Patrick Stewart can :)

Father Guido Sarducci would be proud. "Just add water, and Mr. Tea does the rest!". Shame the video isn't anywhere I can find it.

Video is on the www.teaBOT.com website.

The video of the Father Guido Sarducci "Mr Tea" skit from Saturday Night Live? Thinking probably not :)

Oh, sorry. Wrong video.

Did you go to YC because you couldn't find money here in Toronto?

Not at all. We love our Toronto investors and are looking forward to launching there in the fall.

Blimey, it's a Teasmade for 2015

where do you source the tea from?

This reminds me too much of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Too much?! You make that sound like a bad thing! This totally reminds me of HHGTTG and I want one! Very neat product.

There's a very good reason Dent liked tea. Too bad that Vogon ship couldn't get it right... should have had a teaBOT. I think Douglas Adams would have agreed. #BotThisShip

"When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."

Shame less plug: Dear tea lovers on HN, I am from Nepal - home to some of the best organic tea [1] grown in the foothills of Himalayas. I have been thinking about starting Candy Japan [2] like subscription service but for Nepali tea. Would you be interested? Please e-mail me if you would like to help me start this. sbashyal@gmail.com

[1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/from-assam-to-oolong... [2] http://www.candyjapan.com/candy-japan-crosses-10000-mrr

I have already received a few emails showing interest and I am committed to make this happen. Send me an e-mail today showing interest and I will ship an assorted pack of premium Nepali tea for free for the first month (early September).

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