No stove, no pot, no fuel no coffee? Not anymore with Ottawa Valley entrepreneur's Bripe Coffee Brew Pipe

With pallets of product in warehouses ready to ship across Canada and the USA, Equator Coffee Roasters Co-founder Craig Hall is introducing his latest venture – the Bripe™ Coffee Brew Pipe™ Kit – at product demo events in Equator Coffee's Westboro and Almonte locations this Wednesday July 19th (1PM in Westboro at 412 Churchill Ave. N. in Ottawa, then 4PM at 451 Ottawa St. in Almonte).

Hall is also Co-founder of Bripe Inc., a company he started with a crowd-funding campaign last year with Bripe's inventor and Co-founder Tim Panek, who lives in Costa Rica. Weighing only 337 grams, the CDN $99.99/US $84.95 Bripe Coffee Brew Pipe Kit has everything hikers, kayakers, cyclists, canoeists, birders, mountaineers and light-kit campers need to make a perfect shot of coffee (or tea) wherever their adventures take them in an ultra-light, ultra-portable Bripe pouch.

The idea for the Bripe Coffee Brew Pipe comes from a friendship of nearly 20 years that spans two continents and involves entrepreneurs who share a deep love of adventure and community service. 

Panek escaped the jungles of corporate America over 20 years ago. He and his wife Linda took their four children to the real jungles of Costa Rica to live a life of adventure, entrepreneurship, and community service.

Their newest project is a hostel that will provide medical, training and cultural services on the Quitirrisi indigenous reserve in Costa Rica. When it’s complete, the hostel will sleep approximately 50 people and provide kitchen, dining, training and handicap facilities for First Nations people who must come into the city, then often wait days to get into a public hospital. The hostel will be a much-needed alternative to living on the streets while waiting for essential hospital care.

In 1998 Hall started a Canadian success story with his wife Amber called Equator Coffee Roasters. The couple now have four children of their own living in the country just outside Carleton Place. 

Their coffee company exclusively sources and sells fair trade organic coffee. Equator donates generously to communities in the world’s coffee growing regions that need help accessing basic education and healthcare. The Halls believe, and have proven, that fair trade practices offer a better life for growers and their families in those regions.

Like Panek, Hall loves trekking into the wilderness and sharing his outdoor adventures. The same year he started his company, he was leading a church youth group at a remote Cree community in the Canadian province of Quebec.

Panek happened to be there on a totally different mission, and after meeting Hall, invited his group to participate in a spiritual dance and music gathering. The two men got to know each other and Hall proposed taking his youth group to Costa Rica. Panek hosted the whole group along with Hall’s family to stay at his jungle home on the Pacific Coast.

They went on treks and adventures including a visit to the Grand Chief of the Indigenous Peoples of Costa Rica, and their friendship, soon to span two decades, was sealed.

In 2015, Panek approached Hall with an idea. He wanted to be able to enjoy a great coffee shot when he was outside, and found that all of the existing coffee-making products were too complex, too bulky, and weighed too much to fit into a backpack or in his river kayak. He saw an opportunity to create a simple, compact coffee brewing kit.

And that’s what he did. The Bripe Coffee Brew Pipe is a small, light, copper and silver pipe that makes great coffee in the great outdoors. No electricity, gas canister, kettle or stove. A Bripe only requires ground coffee, and water, and includes a portable butane-powered quad jet torch to fire your brew.

Like most things worth doing in this world, the Bripe required Panek and Hall to sweat the details. Panek made the first Bripe prototype out of paper then fabricated one in copper. He continued prototyping and landed on the “inner cone” design that gives the Bripe its heating and cooling efficiency to make a great coffee shot in three minutes or less.

As soon as he saw his friend’s prototype, Hall said, “I’m in” and insisted they immediately go to a patent office to protect the cool new invention. Hall then used his experience as a coffee guru to help Panek further refine the Bripe. Their collaboration added features such as a precision-etched stainless steel filter for various grinds of coffee, and a thermometer (that also doubles as a stir stick) for precision brewing.

Working together, the two friends also upsized the pipe section of the Bripe so people could enjoy milk, sugar or cream with their brews. They then launched an IndieGoGo campaign in 2016 that raised over $18,000 of product development funding to help get the Bripe into manufacturing and outdoor retail distribution channels.

Starting this summer, Bripes will be available in outdoor stores and indie coffee shops throughout North America. Now everyone can enjoy an ultra-portable, ultra-light coffee shot everywhere, from a remote mountaintop to a white-water river run to a cycling trail to a quiet bench in a city park.

The Bripe co-founders' sense of adventure in creating the Bripe also includes their strong sense of mission. A portion of Bripe Inc.’s profits is going to help build a self-sustaining coffee and cocoa-roasting operation with the Quitirrisi Tribe in Puriscal, Costa Rica under the umbrella of the Fundeico Foundation, with donated land by Tim and Linda.

Wherever your adventures take you, bring your Bripe and enjoy your brew. Tell em Tim and Craig sent ya!