Web Feature: A 'Taste' for Invention

Like many useful inventions, the recently released TasteTimer 1.1 iPhone app sprung from necessity. Duane Fahey, owner of TasteTimer creator Gormaya, was helping Rob Flanders of Lansing, Mich.-based Rudy Baggs Coffee Roasting Company conduct a coffee tasting when he noticed his iPhone couldn’t provide the timing functions he wanted it to. “We were making French press coffee, and he wanted to steep it for three minutes and 30 seconds,” Fahey says. “And I realized the iPhone’s built-in timer will only do three minutes or four minutes—it can’t do three and a half minutes.”

Armed with that creative spark, Fahey began pondering an app that would offer customized timers for French press and far beyond. “Once we started working on the idea we looked at teas, with all the different temperatures and times for different kinds, and it just grew from there,” Fahey says. Released in March for the iPhone and iPod Touch, TasteTimer 1.1 features more than 300 recipes for coffee and tea, plus around 300 more for food. 
   
Gormaya bills the app as requiring “three taps to great taste”: The user clicks on a category, clicks on a drink, reads the recipe and prepare ingredients, then clicks the timer’s start button. As for the instructions, Fahey says one of the chief goals was ease of use. “We give people basic instructions,” he says. “We have a temperature the water should be, the quantity of coffee per water or tea per water, and of course the timer.” Fahey says the user can continue to tweak the recipes to suit his or her taste. “Each recipe can be edited, so you can change the recipes any way you want to or add your own recipe,” he says.

On the coffee side, the app provides instructions on drink types (such as an Americano or a latte) as well as brewing methods (such as AeroPress or Moka pot). Fahey says he has seen coffeehouses integrate it into that setting by finding the ideal brewing time for their beans, then programming it into the TasteTimer for all employees to access. “This way the staff is all on the same page as far as, here’s the new recipe, this is what we use,” he says.

In the tea category, the selections are seemingly endless—for example, there are 113 different options for black tea, and 14 options just for Darjeelings. “There are so many times and temperatures with teas,” says Fahey. “It’s all over the place. So it’s a good reference to have.”
   
Fahey—whose tech background is in Windows programs—says it took some adjusting to master the single-purpose mindset that Apple preaches for its applications. “They really stress at Apple that your app should do one thing and do it really well,” he says. “It’s fun to design something like that because it’s a quicker development time and you can focus on making something really special.”

TasteTimer is available for $3.99 at tastetimer.com.

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