OREA brewer

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The world's most compact full-size coffee brewer.

Orea reached out to me looking for an industrial designer to help him out in his venture of designing a brewer like none other.

It had to be small, durable, aesthetic, had no screws⁠, no moving parts⁠, no assembly⁠ and to improve air flow over other brewers.

THE process

The design stage took several months in which, together with Orea, we designed countless alternatives with different shapes, thickness and drainage patterns and sizes looking to perform the perfect speed of pouring. We tested the alternatives through functional prototypes till we achieved the desired result.

THE solution

We landed with something that delivers fast flow in a flat bed brewer - which helps extract brighter notes from coffee. Our approach solves a lot of the common problems around air flow, both inside the brewer and around it on the "feet". The Orea brewer is designed to optimise air flow - inside and outside the brewer. A lot of brewer designs lead to choking because air has a hard time going through and out and around the brewer.

The design removes everything that seemed unnecessary in coffee brewers in order to reduce size, weight, and to improve packability and compatibility.

Every brewer starts as a solid block of aluminium. It’s then slowly carved out by sophisticated mills, leaving behind a beautiful and structurally strong unibody construction.

This helps with end-of-life recycling too - one solid aluminium item is a lot easier to recycle than an assembled multi-material product. ⁠

We designed the packaging and an internal brochure as well, matching the visual essence of the product and reflecting its concepts through clean and minimalistic graphics.

Orea is designed to fit in many existing outdoors camping cook systems and many common cups. We designed for versatility but didn’t want it to feel like “an outdoorsy product” so that it can fit in the kitchen day to day too, It was not easy to strike that balance.

The brewer comes with a hand-finished optional-to-use leather sleeve. The sleeve helps with handling it when hot and helps improve heat retention while brewing - especially outdoors in variable temperatures.