About Fellow
Fellow is a specialty coffee equipment company founded in 2013 by Jake Miller, launched off a Kickstarter campaign for the Duo Coffee Steeper that raised nearly $200,000 in pre-sales. The company is headquartered in San Francisco's Mission District and has grown from a three-person startup into one of the most recognized names in home coffee gear, with a product line spanning kettles, grinders, French presses, and mugs built around a stated design philosophy of staying "beautifully functional" -- engineering and aesthetics treated as equally non-negotiable rather than trading one off for the other.
That design-first approach has been recognized outside the coffee world, not just inside it: the Ode Brew Grinder won a Red Dot Design Award in 2022, with the jury citing its geometric form and the auto-stop feature that ends grinding cleanly after each dose, and it separately took Best New Product in the Specialty Coffee Association's 2021 awards. Retailers like SFMOMA's museum store carried Fellow early and helped build the brand's reputation for gear that looks intentional on a counter, not just functional in a cabinet -- a reputation that tracks with what we found testing the Ode grinder and Carter Move mug ourselves.
Brand website: fellowproducts.com
What Fellow makes
Fellow's range runs wider than the products we rank. We feature the lines that won their Brew Gazette categories:
Ode Brew Grinder
64mm flat-burr single-dose grinder -- featured on Brew Gazette — featured on Brew Gazette
Carter travel mugs & tumblers
ceramic-lined insulated mugs -- featured on Brew Gazette — featured on Brew Gazette
Stagg EKG electric kettle
gooseneck pour-over kettle with precision temperature control
Clara French Press
double-wall stainless steel French press
Monty espresso cups
ceramic espresso cup and saucer sets
Why we recognized Fellow
The Brew Gazette Top Brand recognition isn't paid for and can't be applied for. We award it to the brands whose products independently earn top-pick status in our hands-on category reviews. Fellow earned it because its products came out on top in 2 separate guides — evaluated the same way every product on this site is: bought, brewed with daily, and judged on what lands in the cup.
Fellow products we feature
Fellow Ode Brew Grinder Gen 2
The 64mm flat steel burrs deliver a grind uniformity conical burrs at any price struggle to match for filter coffee, and the active anti-static system genuinely keeps grounds from clumping and scattering. It's a single-dose grinder with no hopper, so you grind exactly the beans you weigh and never brew stale coffee that's been oxidizing in a bin -- the format coffee purists who rotate single-origin beans actually want. The tradeoff is real: it cannot grind for espresso by design, so it earns its slot specifically as the pour-over and drip specialist, not an all-rounder.
Read the 8 Best Coffee Grinders of 2026 guide →
Fellow Carter Move Ceramic-Lined Travel Coffee Mug 16 oz
The ceramic-lined interior is the reason it earns the upgrade slot: bare stainless can lend coffee a faint metallic edge, and the ceramic layer removes it entirely so the cup tastes the way it does from a proper mug at home. Thermal retention is rated up to 12 hours hot, and the leak-proof flip lid with its Splash Guard actually seals shut, so unlike an open tumbler it can go in a bag. It comes from a genuine specialty-coffee brand, and the design details show it -- dialed in for coffee people, not just general outdoor-brand branding.
Read the 10 Best Travel Coffee Mugs of 2026 guide →What earned Fellow the recognition
- Two category wins across two separate Brew Gazette roundups -- the Ode Brew Grinder Gen 2 (coffee grinders) and the Carter Move (travel coffee mugs) -- each earning its slot on design and cup-quality merits against much larger, more heavily reviewed Amazon staples.
- Independently verified design credibility: the Ode Brew Grinder won a Red Dot Design Award in 2022 and the Specialty Coffee Association's Best New Product award in 2021, recognition earned outside of Amazon review counts.
- The Carter Move's ceramic-lined interior directly solves the metallic-taste problem specialty coffee drinkers run into with bare stainless -- a detail that reflects genuine coffee-industry design thinking, not just outdoor-gear branding stretched onto a mug.
- The Ode's 64mm flat burrs and true single-dose, no-hopper format target the filter-coffee purist directly: maximum grind uniformity and zero stale beans sitting in a hopper, at the cost of espresso capability -- an honest, deliberate tradeoff rather than a compromise.
- Built a specialty-coffee-equipment identity from the ground up since 2013, growing from a three-person Kickstarter-funded startup in San Francisco's Mission District into a design-recognized name that early retail partners like SFMOMA's museum store helped establish.