The Barista Cup looks like a simple travel mug… but in fact, it’s a coffee maker in a cup.

This certainly looks like a travel mug.

It’s rugged, with an excellent silicon grip. 

But it’s more than that, because it’s a coffee maker too.

You remove the lid, add hot water, ground coffee, and cream and sugar to taste. Stir once and you’re done.

Sounds like you’d get a mouthful of coffee grinds with every sip.

Or the coffee would become bitter from being immersed in the hot water for too long.

Fortunately, these issues have been taken care of. So you really can make a cup of gourmet coffee in the mug. No separate coffee maker required.

Here’s how The Barista Cup works…

The simplest thing first.

The sipping hole in the lid is covered with a fine mesh. So… no coffee grinds in your mouth when you drink the coffee.

But that’s not the really innovative part.

Look at the photo on the right and you’ll see this mug is unusual in having a separate part at the base.

At the bottom of the main part of the mug there is a small hole or channel.

When you attach the main body of the mug to the base, and add hot water, it fills both parts.

When you add your favorite ground coffee, the coffee grinds float around in the main part of the mug, releasing their flavors and then slowly sink, finally falling through that channel into the bottom section.

At this point they are now separate from the brewed coffee in the main mug.

The small channel between the two parts acts in the same way as the mesh in a French press after you have pushed the plunger down.

Once you separate the grinds from the liquid coffee, the extraction process  stops and you avoid getting an over-extracted, bitter taste.

With The Barista Cup that separation is achieved through gravity instead a plunger.

Pretty cool idea. 

I’ve used the mug a few times now, and it works as advertised.

The motivation behind The Barista Cup.

The inventor of The Barista Cup, Aziz Patel, was motivated primarily by environmental concerns when developing this mug.

He’s mindful of the impact coffee farming can have on the natural world.

He was looking for a way to brew coffee with a much small environmental footprint.

And I think he has succeeded in some important ways.

First of all, imagine the impact of bypassing the need for a coffee maker. Think of all the millions of old coffee machines that end up in landfills around the world.

Not to mention billions of K-Cups and the like.

With The Barista Cup the coffee ends up in that base section. Once I’d finished my coffee and everything had cooled down, I unscrewed the two parts of the mug over the sink and then tipped the used grinds into our composting bin.

It uses less coffee per cup as well.

One of the claims is that you can use as little as a third of the usual amount of ground coffee when using The Barista Cup.

There’s a huge environmental benefit there too. A cost benefit to you too.

That said, using one third the normal amount didn’t work for me.

I guess it’s a personal taste thing. I like a strong brew. So I doubled the recommended amount of ground coffee.

I was still using less coffee than I would with another method… just not to the degree they suggested.

A great idea for a lot of coffee lovers…

You’re going to love this if you care about the environment.

And you’re going to love it for purely practical reasons if you leave your home each morning with travel mug in hand.

Imagine how simple that becomes when you don’t even need a coffee maker.

Pour hot water into the mug, add ground coffee, plus cream and sugar to taste.

Magic!

You can find out more about The Barista Cup here…

NOTE: This product was sent to us free in return for a review. (That said, we always reserve the right NOT to review a free product if we don't like it, or feel you wouldn't like it.)