Wacaco launches Prestina, a cup-powered manual travel brewer

Wacaco’s newest travel brewer makes one sharp promise: the cup itself drives the press. Prestina landed in the Specialty Coffee Association’s 2026 Best New Product Awards under Consumer Coffee Preparation and Serving Equipment, and its pitch is stripped to the bone, “The simplest way to brew. Rediscovered.”

That design puts Prestina in a very specific lane. It is not trying to out-muscle a full-size pourover setup, where a kettle, dripper and filter stack usually define the ritual. It is not chasing the pressure and basket language of travel espresso gear, either. Instead, it tries to make manual immersion as self-contained as possible, with no electricity and no paper filters, so the workflow can fit into the same pocket of a bag as a mug and a bag of coffee.

For Aeropress users, Prestina reads like a cousin with a different answer to the same portability problem. Aeropress built its following on speed, cleanup and repeatability, while Wacaco’s cup-powered approach pushes even harder on packing light and reducing loose pieces. Wacaco’s own travel-brewing lineage helps explain the move: the Hong Kong company was founded in 2013 by Jessie Wang and Hugo Cailleton, launched the Minipresso in 2014 as what it called the world’s first piston-driven handheld espresso machine, then followed with the Nanopresso in May 2017, Pipamoka in November 2019, Cuppamoka in October 2020 and Picopresso in June 2021.

Prestina also arrives with a clear design-minded streak. Daily Coffee News noted colorways in Clay Pink, Coal Black and Sage Green, and that softer consumer palette fits a brand that has repeatedly turned specialty coffee mechanisms into compact, carry-anywhere objects. The Pipamoka won an iF Design Award in 2021, the Cuppamoka earned an iF Design Gold Award in 2022 and the Picopresso picked up a Red Dot Design Award in 2022. Wacaco also says the Minipresso GR2 shrank the form by 30 percent and offers an adjustable 8-gram or 12-gram basket, which shows how far the company has kept pushing miniaturization.

The timing matters, too. The Best New Product Awards are a show feature of World of Coffee, and the 2026 competition was tied to World of Coffee Brussels in June 2026. Prestina fits that stage precisely: a compact answer for commuters, travelers and home brewers who want something more hands-on than a capsule machine, lighter than a pourover kit and less fussy than a travel espresso rig. Wacaco has spent years shrinking specialty workflows into gear that vanishes into a backpack, and Prestina looks like the latest attempt to make the cup itself do the carrying.