Tea & Coffee Timer

A dedicated brew timer with one-tap presets for green tea, black tea, and French press coffee.

Brew time is one of the few genuinely controllable variables in making tea or coffee, and it has an outsized effect on the result: under-brew green tea and it tastes flat and grassy, over-brew it by even a minute and it turns bitter, because the tannins that create bitterness extract more slowly than the compounds that create flavor. The same logic applies to a French press, where the difference between a clean, balanced coffee and an overly strong, muddy one often comes down to whether it steeped for four minutes or seven.

Despite how much brew time matters, most people time it by feel, or don't time it at all — which is part of why a dedicated timer for this specific task is worth having separately from a general countdown timer. The presets here reflect commonly cited starting points for a few popular styles: a shorter steep for delicate green tea, a bit longer for black tea, and a distinct four-minute mark for French press coffee, which uses a different extraction method entirely from a steeped tea bag.

As with the Egg Timer, these numbers are a reasonable starting point rather than a universal rule — water temperature, leaf or grind size, and personal taste all shift the ideal number slightly. The point of the tool is to make hitting a consistent time effortless once you've found the number that works for you, rather than to dictate exactly what that number should be.

1. Tap a preset brew type.
2. Press Start.
3. You'll hear a sound once the brew time is up.