our story
The Nomad™ is a revolutionary portable espresso machine. If you are a coffee lover you’ll love having the Nomad with you wherever you go. The Nomad makes the highest quality espresso possible, and it does this anywhere you have coffee and hot water. With the Nomad anyone can make great espresso like a skilled barista. The Nomad has been featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, TreeHugger and many other blogs and journals (see In The News).
The Nomad was inspired by the classic hand operated lever machines which remain the benchmark of all espresso machines. Our innovative designers simplified and miniaturized the large, complex lever machines and created a portable espresso machine that’s fun and easy to use. The Nomad is the size of a 15 cm cube, weighs 1.1 kg, and requires no electricity, batteries, or gas propellant cartridges. This makes the Nomad one of the “greenest” espresso machines in the world. With very little effort the Nomad produces 9 bars of pressure and like the classic lever machines users have direct control over the water pressure, flow rate, and volume. The result is the highest quality espresso possible. In addition the Nomad has two modes of operation. When used with the proprietary True Crema Valve™ it compensates for coffee grounds and tamping variations so that anyone can make great espresso like a skilled barista, shot after shot. When used in the classic mode, without the True Crema Valve™, espresso quality is dependent on grind and tamping techniques. In either case the produced beverage is far superior to that made by Moka pots, household electric espresso machines, or single serve pod machines. The Nomad makes perfect espresso shots with full crema that rival those made by the most expensive commercial equipment.
After more than two years of design, development and testing the Nomad completed a successful Kickstarter funding campaign in 2013. With this funding the Nomad is now in production and was officially launched (April 2014) at the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) convention in Seattle to great reviews. Now the Nomad is available worldwide to coffee lovers everywhere.
The Nomad has three patents issued and multiple pending patent applications filed in the United States and Internationally.
About Us
Vincent J. Chen, Ph.D.
Dr. Chen is a research scientist and an inventor of novel machines and technologies. He read Computer Science at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Irvine with original research on psychophysics of visual perception and computational neuroscience. As a clinical service, Dr. Chen conducted functional brain mapping studies to aid preoperative planning before neurosurgery at Department of Radiology, Children's Hospital Los Angeles. In basic science research, he studied brain mechanisms of vision, language, and pain with fMRI and used computational morphometry to investigate normal and diseased brain. Dr. Chen’s life-long interest in drinking, brewing, roasting, and understanding coffee was instrumental in the development of the Nomad.
Curt Morgan
Mr. Morgan is a hands-on entrepreneurial engineer with over twenty-five years of experience in the design and development of medical devices and consumer products. He served as principal design engineer for critical care medical devices, exercise and fitness equipment, robotic industrial equipment, and high volume consumer products. In addition to holding positions of design engineer and director of engineering he co-founded an exercise fitness equipment company for which he acted as vice president and engineering manager. Mr. Morgan was instrumental in the design of several multi-million dollar products and has worked almost entirely in the small entrepreneurial start-up space.