Bonaverde

History

Hans Stier wants a machine that roasts, grinds and brews in a single body. His first attempt was called Kaffee Toro, founded in 2010 and bankrupt in 2013, by his own account. He started again from the same idea the same year, under the name Bonaverde. The money came from the crowd, in four campaigns run on four different platforms, which was then without precedent for an object to be manufactured. Kickstarter, in 2013, aimed at 135,000 dollars and raised more than 680,000 from more than 2,200 backers. Then came Indiegogo, nearly 125,000 dollars, then Seedmatch in August 2014, more than 1.5 million euros, then Seedrs in 2017, more than 1.3 million pounds. The machine was promised for October 2014. It reached the market only in 2017. The design chosen by public vote could not be manufactured, and everything had to be redone. Stier then recounts two sudden deaths in the same year, that of Mr. Chen, founder of the Chinese factory, and that of Henk, who ran the hardware design office. Both of a heart attack. Deprived of a design office and of cash, the company nearly closed there. It then turned to an out-of-home coffee app, the Urban Coffee Club, and stopped dealing with the machine. It was at this point that the factory reported a serial defect. A part fitted outside the specification, to save money, lets condensation in. This can short-circuit the control and start the roaster by itself, with beans inside. Bonaverde announced its insolvency on October 22, 2019, the day of a decision by the Charlottenburg court on its assets. The voluntary bankruptcy filing letter followed on November 14. More than 5,000 machines were already in people's hands. Yet the Berlin refuses to roast as long as the counter for its air filter has not been reset by a contactless tag. Nobody sold them anymore. Owners took apart the internal program, published the structure of the tags, then released in June 2020 an app that recreates them.

What it makes

Bonaverde never had a factory. It designs in Berlin and has the machines built in China by a subcontractor, Homezest. The development of the hardware was entrusted to an outside firm, X-Pect Innovations. Nothing essential was therefore held in-house, which is why the death of one executive was enough to stop the product. The roaster occupies the upper part of the body. The firm never published a cross-section of its machine. What remains are photographs of a dismantled unit, posted online by its own users. They show a round chamber, a bare resistance wound in a flat spiral, and a central hub that drives a stirrer. A ring of perforations lets the air through. Heat therefore arrives by two routes at once: the radiation of the glowing wire, and the air that same wire warms. Nothing resembles the drum of a production machine, where the bean takes most of its heat from the metal it touches. A fan draws the fumes and the chaff, that is, the thin skin the bean loses as it roasts, toward a chaff tray and a filter. The whole, roasting, grinding and brewing included, fits within 800 watts. These 800 watts also serve for grinding and brewing, so heating does not have them to itself. The beans then fall into a steel cone grinder, then into a paper filter watered like rain.

The models

Only one model was released, the Berlin. A batch of 50 to 90 grams, or 0.05 to 0.09 kg. This is the order of magnitude of a sample roaster, the small machine used to taste a lot before buying it. The manual gives 50 g for 600 to 800 ml of coffee, and 80 g for 800 to 1,000 ml. One-liter water tank. Roasting takes ten to fifteen minutes depending on the bean. Launch price: 799 pounds in white, 999 in silver. The price is shown in pounds because the company had raised funds on a British platform and registered a subsidiary in the United Kingdom in June 2017. A first design in bent wood, named Dalia and chosen by public vote in 2013, was never manufactured: it could not be industrialized. The machine sold is the white rectangular case designed by Daniel von Waldthausen. It was shown at the Las Vegas electronics show in January 2016, then put on sale at the end of 2017. Four production runs and more than 5,000 machines in total, according to the founder. No other roaster by the firm was put on sale.

What you gain

Fifty grams heated by 800 watts is little mass to bring up to temperature: the machine sits on a countertop, with no gas or flue. The chaff tray and the charcoal filter retain what smokes. A reviewer notes that he did not set off his fire detector, something that had never happened to him when roasting at home. The pouch of green beans serves as the paper filter, and the grounds fall into it. Between the end of the roast and the cup, only the time to grind and brew goes by, coffee served at 70 degrees.

What you lose

On the machine itself, there is only a tag reader and one button. One cannot write a heating profile, nor correct a temperature rise in progress. The rest went through a chatbot, hence through the firm's servers and a SIM card. Delayed start existed, but through that channel only. Stier admits having chosen 3G over wifi, a technology that aged faster than the machine. Worse, the air filter counter blocks roasting until a new tag is scanned. With the firm dead, the machine stops. The beans cost 2.50 pounds per 50 grams, or 50 pounds a kilo, against about ten for comparable green coffee bought elsewhere.