One of Brisbane’s most reputable specialty coffee venues is putting the Baby Hardtank to the test, compressing cold brew from an 18-hour procedure into a 40-minute extraction that could reshape how Australian cafés approach cold coffee.
The Maillard Project in the heart of Brisbane feels less like a café and more like a coffee laboratory. It’s an environment where light stone, wood and glass create an atmosphere built for experimentation.
At the centre sits a low-set island bar, its espresso machines and pour-over stations arranged like instruments in a controlled study, each designed to showcase the exact flavour profiles Adam Wang and his team develop in-house.
The newest exhibit in this coffee lab is the Baby Hardtank, a compact but powerful cold-brew system that’s capturing attention across the Australian café landscape.
Positioned beside the brew bar, it can compress an 18-hour cold-drip cycle into 40 minutes, turning what is traditionally a slow steeping process into high-efficiency, repeatable brewing.
For Adam, whose venues often serve as testing grounds for innovative equipment, it’s another chance to push extraction into new territory without diluting the purity that defines coffee at The Maillard Project.
The venue’s philosophy is to celebrate the coffees Adam’s team roast in their most authentic forms. Customers won’t find decadent signature drinks packed with other ingredients on the menu.
“The Maillard Project is a pure, coffee-focused venue. We serve coffee in its original form,” Adam says, noting the only available cold drinks are iced long blacks or cold brew, which account for 15 to 20 per cent of sales.
“There are so many amazing origins, beans, processing methods, roasters… coffee is already pretty incredible on its own – why add more to it?”
When BeanScene spoke to Adam, the Baby Hardtank had been installed earlier that day. It’s now available in Australia through Barista Equip which is importing the machine from Polish cold coffee solutions manufacturer Hardtank – established by a trio of coffee enthusiasts wanting to help businesses of all sizes prepare “amazing cold brew in a fraction of the usual time”.
Adam is putting Baby Hardtank to work in his venue – and providing feedback about its performance in an Australian context. As one of the most influential figures in the Brisbane specialty scene (his other venue Coffee Anthology was ranked eighth in the World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops in 2025) his endorsement may encourage more venues to diversify into cold brew – or supercharge their existing operations – with Baby Hardtank.
“Cold brew is easy drinking, offering a cleaner, less bitter taste. We always use filter or lighter-roast coffee, and usually something a bit more interesting – funky, fruity. It’s almost like an iced fruit tea. More mellow, clean. And in warm weather, it’s like drinking a soft drink,” he says.
“We ran several batches on the first day alone with Baby Hardtank – 40 minutes for a cold brew batch is pretty impressive, and a step above the dripping tower we’ve traditionally used that can take anywhere up to 18 hours before we can serve the final product to a customer.”
Baby Hardtank uses accelerated cold extraction technology based around recirculation. Water is constantly circulated and pushed through the extraction basket meaning the coffee, tea, or infusion ingredients are constantly agitated. It also features a unique basket design that the company says “creates an extremely clean brew” without the need for additional filtration.
Adam says the Baby Hardtank enables high volume batch-brewing. A busy café can easily sell 10 litres of cold brew a day, but to keep up, this potentially requires four rounds of tower dripping unless multiple towers are in use.
“It can be challenging to keep up with the volume, but with the Baby Hardtank within half an hour you can brew four litres. And if you clean quickly in between batches – which is possible due to a quick and automated cleaning process – you could easily brew 30 to 40 litres a day.”
Hardtank has crunched the numbers itself and says a single Baby Hardtank batch has capacity for up to 350 grams of ground coffee and creates four to five litres of cold brew. Through multiple cycles, cafés can serve up to 300 portions per day.
Adam says this will enable his café to offer cold brew with various origins and blends on any given day. He also expects Baby Hardtank will drive diversification for other cafés that invest.
“A lot of newer cafés, especially in Melbourne, love using cold brew as the base for signature drinks. If you’re doing a mixed drink with cold brew, consistency is vital,” he says.
“With the Baby Hardtank you can achieve that; it’s not influenced by factors like humidity, temperature, how much coffee you use – things that can affect drip tower cold brew. With the Hardtank, your cold brew becomes much more replicable.”
The big opportunity
It seems Baby Hardtank’s arrival in Australia has been one of the worst kept secrets in the Australian café scene. Without much effort, Barista Equip CEO Brett Bolwell has fielded some 120 inquiries from a range of cafés, roasters, and other venues like golf clubs.
As this edition of BeanScene goes to print, there will be about a dozen Baby Hardtanks in the national market.
“I consider Adam at The Maillard Project the ‘King of Specialty’. He’s a roaster, a purist, and definitely a traditionalist. Plus, Brisbane and southeast Queensland have a very strong cold coffee market. It’s a pivotal café for us to help showcase Baby Hardtank,” Brett says.
He says there is a high level of interest because cafés can have all the upside with little downside. In other words, the machine offers a streamlined cold brew steeping process without impacting the flavour profile.
This is what he has concluded after several rounds of testing with various café owners and roastmasters. The clarity and freshness of the final product have consistently stood out, he says.
Brett says the real opportunity lies in cutting labour costs per cup while unlocking a wider range of boutique, higher-value cold drinks. By cutting a lengthy, labour-intensive process to just minutes and supporting the growing demand for more “decadent” cold beverages, he says cafés can create $10.50 drinks with a cost of goods and labour under $3, delivering margins of around 70 per cent.
“For cafés producing cold coffee at any kind of scale, their preparation time goes from an hour with traditional methods to five minutes a batch with Baby Hardtank. From that perspective, its biggest advantage is how quick, clean, and easy it is to use,” he says.
“From a safety point of view, you have to be careful with microbial growth with traditional tower systems, so the clean down can take 40 minutes. Whereas with Baby Hardtank you push a button. That’s it. There’s effectively no clean down time. That’s where the efficiency savings are.”
Baby Hardtank is available through various arrangements, including rent-to-own.
“My calculations show cafés financing the machine on a rent-to-own basis would breakeven after three years with $12 per day or $85 per week,” he says. “That’s two to three cold brew drinks a day, which is very achievable for most cafés.”
Barista Equip is offering free installation and set up until end of March 2026.
For more information, visit baristaequip.com.au
This article appears in the February 2025 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
