The Teapresso debut's at World Tea Expo

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!

http://www.theteaguy.com/illustrious.htm