Consumer kitchen and novelty food equipment manufacturer Sensio has revived the legacy coffee brand Brim, which had its heyday in the 1960-80s as a popular decaf brand featuring the tagline, “Fill it to the rim… with Brim.”
While technically still the same iconic brand, gone are both the iconic brown-tin packaging and the rhyming tagline. Consumers may still fill cups to the rim, but they are now instead urged by the company first and foremost to “Brew Like an Artisan,” a slogan aimed squarely at the modern specialty coffee market.
Brim Coffee originated in the early 1960s as a canned, strictly decaf coffee product made by General Foods. The original products disappeared from shelves in the mid-1990s amid corporate reshuffling.
The arms of barista Blair Smith, who helps lead consumers through the brewing process in a series of interactive videos for the new Brim launch.
Ownership of the brand has changed hands more than once since then, eventually leading to an acquisition by Sensio in 2014. At that time the manufacturer applied the Brim name to a conventional drip coffeemaker featuring single and multi-cup capabilities, emblazoned with the familiar Brim logo, a tilted coffee cup dotting the “i” and marketing materials asserting, “From the signature packaging to the unforgettable tagline, Brim is still the same iconic brand you know and trust since 1961.”
To help lead the brand into the current craft coffee landscape, Sensio has also brought on board resident expert and brand ambassador Blair Smith, a barista for California-based coffee company Augie’s Coffee Roasters and a U.S. Brewers Cup finalist and judge.
Sensio debuted the reimagined Brim brand online this week, with retail sales expected to launch in May through Amazon and Williams-Sonoma. Here’s a rundown of the new product line, which includes two burr grinders, an automatic drip coffee machine, a pourover coffee kit and a cold brew kit:
Brim Pourover Coffee Kit
Brim Pour Over kit. Product image courtesy of Brim.
The new Brim Pour Over Coffee Kit includes a Chemex-shaped, single-piece glass brewer/carafe that brews up to 30 ounces and includes a reusable laser-etched steel filter cone for $39.99.
The Brim pourover carafe with cold brewer accessory. Product image courtesy of Brim.
For $49.99, the Smart Valve Cold Brew Coffee Maker includes a brewer and a decanter, each with its own lid; the valve opens upon placing the brewing onto the decanter, allowing brew to pass through one of the included felt filters.
Brim 8-Cup Pour Over Coffee Maker
Product image courtesy of Brim.
Brim’s automatic 8-Cup Pour Over Coffee Maker bears some stylistic similarity to the Oxo line of coffee makers, while opting for the pourover-style of delivering water onto coffee in a filter held by the carafe, as opposed to a basket-holder on the machine itself. The hourglass-shaped glass carafe is included and comes with both a laser-etched reusable filter or optional paper filters for “cleaner, sweeter” cups.
The machine also offers “brew pulse” technology that pauses the water for blooming, features a 1500-watt heating element capable of maintaining water temps in the SCA-recommended range of 197-204F, and will carry a price tag of $179.99.
Brim Electric Handheld Burr Grinder
Product image courtesy of Brim.
At $69.99, the Brim Electric Handheld Burr Grinder has a four-tiered structure similar to an electric pepper mill, with a battery-powered motor on top driving steel burrs in a grinding chamber below, a hopper in the center and grinds receptacle at the bottom. Compact and portable, it purports to be capable of particle sizes ranging from espresso to French press but is particularly oriented towards grinding for Aeropress.
Brim Conical Burr Grinder
Product image courtesy of Brim.
Taking a page from the Breville BCG450XL format that was later also adopted by the Wilfa Svart coffee grinder, the Brim Conical Burr Grinder for $99.99 offers 17 gradations of fineness and a timer knob demarcated by dosage in desired numbers of cups, rather than seconds.
Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
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Like , wow . ANOTHER company trying to re-invent the wheel.
I bet you are the original Hulk.
I bought one of the Conical Burr grinders from Best Buy.
It quit working after two uses. I took it back to Best Buy for a replacement, and opted for the Handheld Burr grinder instead because the other model took up too much counter space. Big mistake. It doesn’t have any way to force the beans into the burr other than a little four bladed fan-like thing. It seems intnded to blow the beans into the burr. It seemed to take forever to grind the beans, and has a limited capacity, so you can’t grind enough for an 8 cup pot of coffee.
I returned it to Best Buy and got another of the higher end model.
It grinds efficiently, but also has a limited capacity. It looks to be right at the max fill line with only 8 cups worth of beans.
But the biggest problem is the container that catches the ground coffee. It’s an awkward shape for pouring the grounds into your filter without spilling them all over the counter. In addition, static electricity built up during grinding means there are grounds trapped in the container, around the recess the container fits into, and trapped in the delivery chute, which is hard to reach.
I have to spend several minutes every time I use it cleaning up spilled coffee grounds.
Neither one of these grinders is worth buying; very poorly designed, both of them.
Unfortunately, I continued to try to get this POS to work suitably days after Best Buy’s two week no-questions-asked policy had expired.
I’m going to return it to them anyway, just so I can let them know they’re sellng useless coffee grinders. I already left a complaint about the smaller model.
Brim coffee was a favourite of my mother. I’ve kept a few items she had, one of which is a bottle marked “Brim” in which she kept odd items. I’m thrilled to see that this item is back.
Lisa Muzeroll
As I read the descriptions of all the products, my first thought was that these will look pretty on an empty countertop but won’t work worth a darn. Glad you let us know firsthand.