Expert's Rating
Pros
- Distinctive aesthetic design
- Intuitive LED interface
- Superior heating and brewing
- Wide range of brewing style options from drip to espresso to cold brew to tea
- Biodegradable pods
Cons
- Restrictive dispenser area fits smaller cups
- Pods only available from Bruvi
- Narrow selection of coffees
Our Verdict
Choose the Bruvi if you want the best balance of pod-brewing convenience and environmental consciousness in a beautiful design with the ability to brew a wide array of drinks types. But beware the limited selection of actual coffee pods from this new contender.
Best Prices Today: Bruvi BV-01
In the trade-off between coffee-making convenience and environmental consciousness, pod brewers generally sit all the way at the end of the spectrum, where convenience wins out over any concern whatsoever for the fate of the planet. The Bruvi BV-01 brewer breaks convention with other pod-based brewers in both its approach to environmental impact and the overall design of the brewer. It’s smarter, more stylish, and more eco-friendly than any pod brewer I’ve tried so far.
What is the environmental impact of a Bruvi coffee maker?
Brew pods such as K-Cups are single-use plastics of the worst order, not accepted for recycling in many municipalities, and requiring dismantling and washing even then. The people most likely to opt for the convenience of a pod-based brewer are not those with environmental impact foremost on their minds, and I’ve encountered few who actually go to the trouble of emptying and washing their pods. Let’s not kid ourselves: They mostly end up in landfills.
Bruvi B-Pods are designed for superior brewing and made to biodegrade, but they’re only sold by Bruvi and the range of actual coffees available is narrow at this time.
Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry
Bruvi’s approach to sustainability is markedly different from from other brewers, because its pods are designed not for recycling, but for decomposition. Given that hardly anyone breaks down their coffee pods to put the grinds in the compost bin and the plastic or aluminum container in the recycle bin, Bruvi employs what it calls Guilt-Free Toss pods, which decompose 84 percent in about 500 days (compared with only two percent for conventional coffee pods) and leave no microplastics behind after fully decomposing.
The star of the show is the 3.5 x 5.5-inch color LED display, which presents clear, obvious options for every part of the experience.
So, even if you’re not the type to pull apart your pods for proper disposal, you can still feel better about the waste you’re producing with your coffee habit. This is especially good for business environments where there’s no expectation that anyone will put labor into recycling pods.
The Bruvi BV-01 offers stand-out design
Beyond its more realistic approach to eco-friendly pod brewing, the Bruvi BV-01 is an outstanding coffee maker. Its aesthetics are clean and bright, and its display is vibrant and intuitive. Everything about this brewer stands out as distinct from the crowded field of pod brewers. For starters, its ivory body is handsomely crafted, with smooth, rounded edges that are neither bulbous nor squared. It has the vague appearance of a nested trio of kitchen canisters rather than a blocky countertop appliance.
Unboxing the Bruvi, you get an immediate sense of its distinctiveness. It comes wrapped in a cloth bag custom fitted to the brewer. If you wanted to take it on a trip, you could save and reuse the bag as a Bruvi tote for taking the machine on trips. (Not that the machine is so light that this is a realistic idea.) The cloth-wrapped extension cord is pliable and stylish, and looks, feels, and coils better than typical plastic-wrapped cords.
Capped with a bamboo cover, the water tank is ergonomically designed and easy to remove for filling. A grab handle is shaped into one corner of the tank, making it effortless to grab with one hand and carry to the sink. And since the whole tank is clear, you can see from a distance whether you’ll need a refill before brewing.
But the star of the show is the 3.5 x 5.5-inch color LED display, which presents clear, obvious options for every part of the experience. Sharp, high-contrast green or white icons illuminate the experience. Need to connect to Wi-Fi? The Wi-Fi icon shows white instead of green. Low on water? You’ll see an obvious water icon. Inserted a tea pod? You’ll see tea options instead of coffee options. Any icon not needed for what you’re doing right now disappears so you can make clear choices even if you’re half asleep. Hands-down, the on-screen experience of the Bruvi is the most intelligent I’ve seen on any coffee machine. Just enough information, simply presented, with unmistakable meanings.
The Bruvi’s 3.5 x 5.5-inch LED display offers the most intuitive brewing experience we’ve seen on any smart brewer.
Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry
What’s the brewing experience with a Bruvi BV-01?
While the mechanics of pod usage are in no way novel with the Bruvi, the pods themselves are unique beyond being designed to decompose. Like higher-end Keurig machines, the Bruvi scans the pod’s label and adjusts brewing parameters for brewing: temperature, brew time, pre-infusion, water bypass, water bypass temperature, and contact time. The pod contains up to 40 percent more coffee than comparable Keurig pods, making for more robust brews, and the design of the pod chamber prevents the brewed coffee from ever touching the inside of the machine, so your coffee isn’t passing over a shelf of dried coffee from previous brews as it pours from the pod to your cup.
The Bruvi’s pod chamber sits inside the machine and drops used pods into a holding compartment for later disposal.
Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry
With a pod inserted, your options appear on screen. Choose your cup size, whether you want a hotter brew, a stronger brew, low acid, iced or cold brew, and hit Start. The machine heats up in five seconds and a surprisingly quiet pump begins infusing your coffee. Little parentheses on either side of the Start icon act as a progress bar through the process. Again, relative to any other pod brewer I’ve tested, this machine stands out for its simplicity and attention to detail, though the coffee spewing straight from the pod sometimes sprays a bit to the sides, leaving a film on the edges of the cup .
If you’re brewing into a travel mug, you can pop out the bamboo-faced drip tray to accommodate a taller cup. I found some of my taller travel mugs still didn’t fit, and also wider coffee mugs made for a tight squeeze into the horizontal space. While not a show-stopper, these moments of disruption in the service of the Bruvi design aesthetic slightly undermined the otherwise excellent brewing experience. (In one case I ended up brewing into a highball glass and then pouring the coffee into my travel mug from there, which is an inelegant user experience.)
What smart brewing features does the Bruvi BV-01 have?
Apart from the Wi-Fi setup, I found the Bruvi’s mobile app more of a distraction than a benefit. The on-screen features are so straightforward that I never needed to resort to the app to configure a brew. And the machine heats up so quickly that I can’t imagine needing to schedule a brew. Why bother when you can drop in a pod and have coffee in your cup a minute later?
Still, even compared with other smart brewers, the interface on the Bruvi, its diversity of brewing functions from cold brew to espresso or tea, and its clear and obvious icons make it one of the best smart brewers around. The next generation of smart coffee-maker designers would do well to take cues from this example.
Where can you buy Bruvi B-Pods?
One big hassle with the Bruvi is that, unlike K-Cups and Nespresso pods, B-Pods are not widely available. At press time, only the Bruvi website sells them, and the coffees are mostly smaller brands you’ve never heard of unless you buy your coffee from niche roasters California. So if you’re looking for a pod brewer that works with Peet’s or Starbucks, this ain’t it.
That said, the coffees that came in my variety pack were flavorful and true to profile for their types. I found their espressos rich, though just as flat as any other pod-based espresso save the Nespresso ristretto. So, although the choices are few and niche, there’s very good coffee to be had in the B-Pod format. It’s just an added hassle to have to order it by mail.
The bottom line on the Bruvi BV-01
As a pod-brewer, the Bruvi BV-01 is an excellent machine. Its overall design, the speed of heating and brewing, and the attention to detail throughout are truly top-notch. The range of versatile brewing options is great, and the coffees are delicious. For my own purposes, pod brewers are a tough sell because I simply don’t value convenience over control, flavor, and environmental impact. But if I were in the market for a pod brewer, the Bruvi BV-01 would be at the top of my list.
Best Prices Today: Bruvi BV-01
Author: Robert Strohmeyer, Contributing Writer
Robert has been covering tech since the late 1990s, and served as Executive Editor of PCWorld from 2005 to 2010. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Wired, Macworld, Maximum PC, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and many others.