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If you’ve been to a specialty coffee shop in the past five years, it’s likely that you’ve seen the Fellow Stagg EKG electric kettle. You know the one. The gooseneck spout, the (typically) blacked-out exterior, the antler-like handle, and the square base that heats it all up. For coffee lovers, Fellow is a brand that’s elevated the basic grinder or French press to an elegant design piece, and the Stagg EKG is the status-y kettle to own if you want a more precise pour-over. It heats water to a specific temperature, maintains that temperature for up to an hour, plus packs in a built-in timer to help you keep track of your brew time. It’s basically the perfect electric kettle already, but Fellow is one-upping itself with the release of a new model this year: the Fellow Stagg EKG Pro.
The Stagg EKG Pro takes everything that makes the original electric kettle excellent—sleek design and an easily controllable push-button dial—plus throws in some bonuses like the ability to schedule a boil, set an altitude to avoid boiling over, and a pre-boil setting to sanitize water before hitting a desired temperature. You can watch your water (and only water, please) come up to temperature through the LCD screen, which now comes with a color display. Since the kettle’s already pretty quiet, Fellow also added a new chime function so that the kettle can alert you when your water’s good to go. One other crucial design tweak is a new and improved, leakproof lid for people who’ve complained that the original model spills out water when the kettle in the pouring position.
“In 2017, our iconic Stagg EKG electric kettle revolutionized the coffee industry and set the undisputed standard in electric pour-over kettles. Five years later, we are raising that bar again,” Jake Miller, Fellow’s founder and CEO, stated in a press release, calling the new kettle “a vision into the future of pour-over brewing.”
We wouldn’t call the Stagg EKG Pro a must-have, exactly, if you already own the original. But if you’ve been holding out, the Pro model only costs an extra $30 for a handful of extra features, including the ability to connect to WiFi for future updates. The Pro’s release will also dovetail with the launch of the Pro Studio Edition kettle, which is essentially the regular Pro with upgraded materials (i.e. lots of metal parts, plus that updated lid).
Both the Pro and Pro Studio kettles are available for pre-order from Fellow right now, with units shipping out in mid-October. If you’re gearing up for gift season, you’re looking at a slam-dunk unit for the coffee snob on your list.