Brew timer

Turns a steep time from something a barista intends into something the bar can hold a shift to.

Mechanically it is trivial and that is exactly why it gets underspecified. The engineering is entirely in the human loop, and it has three parts. NOTIFICATION: a bar with a grinder, a blender and a queue is a loud room, and an alert that cannot compete with that room does not exist. CHANNEL COUNT: a single timer can only hold one steep, so the moment a second pot goes down the barista is holding a time in their head, and a time held in the head is a time that ends late. POSITION: the timer has to be startable in the same movement as the pour and visible from wherever the barista goes next, or the sequence breaks and the step is skipped. Everything else in this category — the leaf, the water, the temperature — can be specified on paper and then complied with imperfectly. The steep is the one variable where the equipment either enforces the spec or quietly does not.

• Buy channels for your PEAK simultaneous steeps, not for your average order. Count the worst case honestly — a table ordering several different teas at once is one ticket and several independent clocks — and buy for that. A timer that runs out of channels during a rush is not partially useful; it teaches the team that the timer is optional, and that lesson does not un-teach.
• Specify the ALERT for the loudest the room ever gets, not for how it sounds in the showroom. Stand at the tea station while the grinder and the blender are running and decide from there. If the alert cannot win that room, buy visual or haptic, or move the timer into the line of sight.
• Fix the mounting position before you fix the model. A timer that has to be found is a timer that gets started late, and a late start is a longer steep than the spec by exactly the amount of the search. It should be startable with the same hand movement that finishes the pour, and readable from where the barista goes next.
• Assume wet hands and hot vessels. Buttons that need a fingernail, a touchscreen that will not register through moisture, or a unit that slides when pressed one-handed will all be worked around rather than used. Magnetic or fixed mounting matters more than feature count.
• Reject the phone. It is the cheapest option and the one that guarantees the discipline collapses — it leaves the bar in a pocket, it is a hygiene problem on a food-contact station, and it puts a personal device in the middle of a service routine. If budget is genuinely the constraint, a single-channel dedicated unit still beats a phone.
• Treat the sand timer as presentation and keep the working timer regardless. A guest-facing hourglass is a nice thing on a pot menu, and it controls nothing that happens on the bar side. Deciding one replaces the other is how a specialty tea programme quietly stops timing anything.
• Tie the timer to the steep times in the temperature & time reference rather than to a habit. The reference is the single source for what each tea needs, and the timer's job is only to make that source enforceable — if the two disagree, the reference wins and the habit changes.
• Give it an owner and a battery check in the opening routine. This is the cheapest item in the category and the one whose silent failure costs the most quality, because a dead timer does not announce itself: the team simply drifts back to estimating and nobody records the day it started.