A lot has been said about the wastefulness of pod-based coffee makers, especially when compared with other options like automatic espresso machines and dual coffee makers. Despite that, the category remains very popular because it’s still one of the most convenient ways to get a great cup of coffee at home, especially since everything’s pre-measured and pre-mixed in a small container. If anything, people only hate the fact that you have to be stuck with one brand, since Nespresso machines won’t exactly work with Keurig K-Cups and so on. The HiBrew H6 looks to put an end to this exclusivity.
No, they haven’t convinced manufacturers to make their coffee machines work with other brands of coffee pods. Instead, they made a coffee maker that works with four of the most popular coffee pods in the market, allowing you to brew coffee using any capsule from one of those four brands.
The HiBrew H6 is an erstwhile standard-looking coffee pod machine, with compact dimensions that’s just enough for its single-serve brewing function. Like other coffee pod machines, it’s got a tray section at the base with just enough headroom to accommodate a single drinking vessel and a pull out section for placing a coffee pod. Unlike them, though, it can recognize coffee pods from three different brands, namely Nespresso, DG, and Keurig K-Cup, as well as the more brand-agnostic ESE pods, allowing you to buy any blends you like from those different standards and brew them in the same machine.
According to the outfit, it will adjust the brewing temperature, volume, and pre-brewing time based on the kind of the pod you put in the machine. This means, it should, theoretically, brew a Nespresso pod just as well as a standard Nespresso coffee maker. Same with using a K-Cup in a Keurig-branded device.
The HiBrew H6 doesn’t force you to stick with default settings, either, as it allows users to adjust a number of parameters, so you can play around with different settings to see which you like best. Even better, you can save your settings so the machine will use it as the default for that type of pod, which is very convenient. For extraction temperature, you can set it at 80, 85, 90, 91, 93, 94, or 95 degrees Celsius, while also offering a cold brew mode that sets it to 25 degrees Celsius, so you can get iced coffee drinks using this thing (you need to add ice cubes afterwards, of course). Pre-brewing time can be set anywhere from 0 to 10 seconds, so you can saturate the coffee grounds to your liking, while volume can bet set from as low as 20ml to as high as 360 ml, with the machine able to accommodate drinking cups up to 5.5 inches tall.
The machine can be set in advance, of course, with a 24-hour programmable timer allowing you to have freshly-brewed coffee as soon as you wake up in the morning. Other features include 20-bar high-pressure brewing, NTC and PID temperature control technologies, automatic pressure release, a steam drainage technology (for eliminating residual water), and a 1.5L detachable water tank in the back, although it can also be integrated directly into plumbing.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the HiBrew H6. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $169.
