Just when you thought your morning coffee ritual couldn’t get any better, Portuguese design student Davide Mateus has gone and one-upped your drip filter technique with Café Balāo, a two-tiered, reinforced glass system that allows users to watch the brewing process as it happens.
With a design construction that Gale Boetticher would have been proud of, Café Balāo is used by sitting one receptacle on top of the other, placing ground coffee in the top section and water in the bottom. A submerged electric coil brings the water to boil and physics does the rest, as the boiling water is forced upwards to mix with the coffee for as long as the device is plugged in. Powered down, the coffee cools and flows back into the bottom receptacle, leaving the grinds in the chamber above.
According to Mateus, the setup results in perfectly brewed coffee every time, thanks to the glassware used and the brewer’s ability to control every step of the process. If Mateus has his way, the Café Balāo prototype will find its way to industrial production and we’ll all be able to brew a cup of Joe with chemist-like precision soon.

This is another example of product transparency and more evidence of the growing interest in how our products work.