The Varia Orbi espresso machine and brewer (center). Daily Coffee News photo by Howard Bryman.
Hong Kong-based coffee equipment company Varia has introduced its first electric brewing system, the Orbi, an upright cylindrical brewer designed to profile and automate brewing for espresso, capsules, drip and tea.
Featuring dual built-in scales and a custom pump paired with advanced software, the Orbi was introduced in April at World of Coffee San Diego, where the company with New Zealand roots and Chinese manufacturing ties also won a Best New Product award for its VS4 home coffee grinder.
(Read all of DCN’s World of Coffee San Diego coverage.)
Worldwide sales and shipping are slated to begin later this summer, while pricing has not been announced.
Daily Coffee News photo by Howard Bryman.
Varia Founder Ramsey Gyde told Daily Coffee News the Orbi is designed primarily as a capable, compact espresso machine.
Inside the Orbi is a PID-controlled thermocoil heating system designed to deliver stable water temperatures from a 150-milliliter reservoir to a 58-millimeter commercial-style group head and portafilter attachment. The system is compatible with standard 58-millimeter group shower screens and filter baskets.
A custom pump developed by Varia and a pump manufacturer is designed to maintain precise water pressure as conditions change, including through thermal expansion and contraction during regular and heavy use.
“It’s a different mechanics,” Gyde said. “This is a new technology, something that we’ve been working on with [partners] purely for this product.”
Daily Coffee News photo by Howard Bryman.
Sensors monitor flow and pressure, enabling pre-infusion, extraction analysis, profiling and automation. One scale in the base weighs the entire system, while a second weighs only what lands in the receptacle. With automated taring built into its recipe modes, the Orbi detects the weight of the ground coffee, the added water, the finished brew and, after the receptacle is removed, the spent grounds.
The interface guides users through what to add and when. Using data gathered along the way, the system calculates yield, compares it to the user’s goals and recommends dose or grind adjustments.
“A lot of the time with brewing, we have to have the machine, we have to have a scale, we have to understand a recipe logic and we have to be physically able to execute that logic. For people new to coffee, that’s actually quite a challenge,” Gyde said. “What [Orbi] enables is a recipe execution environment that is purely there to support all of that burden.”
Daily Coffee News photo by Howard Bryman.
With different included attachments, the Orbi can also perform staged, programmable brewing for filter-style brews and pressure-profiled brewing with coffee capsules.
“This is very different for roasters, and it’s about giving confidence to roasters and producers and creators to be able to understand that what they test as a recipe can be executed [by customers] to the same level,” Gyde said.
The Orbi’s cylindrical form and portability place it near an expanding field of portable consumer espresso makers from brands such as OutIn, Cera+, MHW 3Bomber and others. Yet its larger, heavier construction, dual scales and related features position it as a more advanced tool for professional coffee labs and training centers, as well as homes and offices.
Gyde said the closed-loop brewing platform behind the Orbi will also be used in additional, larger equipment products.
Daily Coffee News photo by Howard Bryman.
“This is just one of the products that this technology is being applied to,” Gyde said. “There’s other formats that will come that are for the different use cases.”
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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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