BY WILL GREENWALD*
Like coffee, there’s a whole world of high-quality and varied teas to explore, and the best ones don’t come in prepackaged bags or pods. Loose leaf is the best tea, but it usually requires getting a tea ball or disposable bags for steeping, plus a separate kettle for boiling water before you start brewing.
That’s where the Craftea Ultimate Tea Maker comes in. The Craftea is a $199 high-tech teapot that heats and steeps any tea in a single container. There are no teabags or kettles, and no dunking or stirring; instead, the Craftea stirs the tea as it heats and brews, ensuring the flavor and heat are distributed evenly throughout the water. It’s expensive for a teapot, though, and it doesn’t offer any connected features or wireless controls like the Bluetooth Philips Saeco GranBaristo Avanti$2,999.95 at Williams-Sonoma or the WeMo-enabled Mr. Coffee$111.69 at Amazon coffee makers. But it can brew an
The Craftea looks a bit like a blender, with a pitcher-shaped stainless steel teapot sitting on a tall white-and-green plastic base. The base is deeply recessed, preventing the pitcher from being easily dislodged when in use. A small monochrome LCD sits on the front of the base, with a Power button to the right, and Left, Right, and Select buttons below.
The teapot is a brushed stainless steel canister designed to fit snugly in the base, with a large, thick white-and-green plastic handle and flip-up lid. The handle is big enough and provides enough clearance that there’s little danger of accidentally burning your fingers on the metal walls of the pot when gripping it. The lid has a safety release button to prevent it from accidentally flipping open, and it can be removed when you want to wash the different parts of the pot.
A removable plastic-and-wire-mesh filter sits inside the pot, just behind the angled spout in front. The filter is fine enough to prevent most loose teas from getting into your cup when pouring (though I encountered the occasional stray fleck of tea leaf), and is easily rinsed along with the rest of the pot. A metal pin in the bottom of the pot holds the removable rubber agitator, a small nub that gently stirs the water when the Craftea is brewing.
Setup and Brewing
Brewing your favorite type of tea is simple. Turn the Craftea on and confirm that the pot is in the base and the agitator is in the pot. The display will tell you to add your tea and water to the pot. The Craftea doesn’t come with a scoop or other measuring system for loose tea, so you’ll want to check with the packaging of your tea or look to the included herbal tea recipe booklet for the right amount to add; too much loose tea in the pot can throw off the balance of the finished product. Lines on the inside of the pot indicate whether you’ve added water for one, two, three, or four cups.
Once all of that is in place, select the type of tea you’re using with the buttons on the base. The Craftea will adjust the brewing process to best fit your tea, whether it’s black, chai, green, herbal, oolong, rooibos, or white. When you select your tea, the Craftea will automatically begin heating the water to the proper temperature, slowly spinning the agitator to create a gentle vortex in the pot that distributes the heat and tea leaves.
Flavors and Blends
I made a few different kinds of tea with the Craftea, using loose tea blends from McNulty’s Tea & Coffee. I started with 1001 Nights, a flavored green tea blend made with the Craftea’s Green Tea setting. It came out smooth and perfectly brewed; since the Craftea constantly circulates the water and leaves, it makes sure everything is evenly distributed throughout the pot. It made a fresh, somewhat fruity green tea mix.
CrafteaI then brewed a pot of Jamaican Ginger, a black tea blend with ginger, using the Craftea’s Black Tea/Pu-erh (a fermented, dark Chinese tea) setting. My first attempt had too much tea in the pot, which resulted in an acidic drink I had to throw out; this was user error. The second pot I attempted, with a more carefully measured amount of tea, turned out beautifully. It was a strong, distinctive cup of black tea with a subtle ginger flavor.
One of the big benefits of using the Craftea is its ability to make chai, so I brewed a pot of hot Chai Tea Spice Blend with soy milk using the machine’s Quick Chai setting. The chai was thoroughly well-mixed and brewed, with the flavor fully infused throughout the soy milk. The blend was spicy, with notable cinnamon and ginger overtones.
Craftea encourages customized tea blends, especially for chai. The machine has a Custom Chai setting that offers more flexibility for brewing time over the Quick Chai setting. The store-bought chai blend I purchased was a clear mix of individual components like tea leaves, seeds, fruit, and herbs (don’t expect the same quality from more manufactured and prepackaged chai and tea blends), and it turned out well using the default settings. I could easily see the Craftea becoming an ideal chai and herbal tea device for adventurous users who frequent spice shops and are willing to make their own blends. The included recipe booklet includes many suggestions for tea mixes, but only a handful of specific recipes, including a very basic but fragrant cardamom-and-cinnamon chai blend.
Conclusions
The Craftea is a very clever teapot. It lets you drop the teabag entirely and choose from a variety of tea blends and variations, each with their own preset to ensure a perfectly brewed drink. It takes the slow, multi-container process of making tea and turns it into a simple matter of filling a pot and pressing a button. That said, it will set you back quite a lot more than your run-of-the-mill electric kettle, and it doesn’t offer any connected features to help justify its high price. But if you drink tea on a daily basis—particularly of the loose leaf variety—the Craftea might be just the teapot for you.
