Did you buy a useless $400 "smart" juicer and now feel the need to accessorize it with more extrusions from the Internet of Shit timeline? Then The Leaf from Teaforia is just the thing: it's a tea-maker that uses DRM-locked tea-pods to brew tea in your kitchen so you don't have to endure the hassle of having the freedom to decide whose tea you brew in your tea-brewing apparatus, and so that you can contribute to the impending environmental apocalypse by generating e-waste every time you make a cup of tea.
The key components aren't dishwasher safe, either, so you'll be needing to keep special cleaning brushes by the sink to keep it all running.
In the extremely unlikely event that the startup behind this brilliant idea should fail, the combination of cloud-reliant features and DRM-crippled tea pods means that you'll have to throw the whole thing away.
Look, if you want a pointlessly overcomplicated way to make tea in the morning, may I politely suggest that you buy a lovely little Teasmade?
The brewing process is very impressive to watch, but the Leaf is all about the teas: it will only brew Teaforia’s proprietary Sips. Yet the teas themselves were a mixed bag, or box, as it were. Some were truly lovely. Wisdom and Grace, a chai-like rooibos that was, according to its product page, “originally blended for His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” was warming and soothing, reminiscent of mulled wine. The Jade Dragon promised honeysuckle in its tasting notes and it delivered. But many of the Sips tasted very under-brewed, and didn’t come out hot enough to enjoy for very long. Many of the promised tasting notes were vivid in the smell of the tea, but absent from the actual taste.The Earl Grey variety presented the perfect opportunity to put a friend and myself through a little blind taste test. My boyfriend, who is well trained from making my daily morning tea, brewed a Tazo Earl Grey while the Teforia micro-infused the Earl Grey Sip. We labeled them A and B and gave them a taste. We were both convinced that A had to be the Teforia, because it was…better, basically. How wrong we were! The watery, over-perfumed B was the Teforia brew. Oops.
A $400 Smart Tea Machine Gave This Brit an Existential Crisis
[Libby Watson/Gizmodo]
