This rudimentary sketch was my initial idea for a tool I originally called "Spilt/Shot." Looking at it, you might be puzzled as to why it bears no resemblance to the Splitshot sitting on your coffee counter today. Let me take you behind the scenes of its design, failure, and development journey.
Excited by this initial idea, I moved quickly to have it rendered and prototyped.
Early testing showed the concept to be feasible, and the design refinements that followed came naturally, bringing early progress and momentum.
The Cost of a Dream
To take the next step of prototyping in stainless steel, I took on the role of a traveling salesman, and visited a multitude of CNC and metal 3D-printing companies to seek production quotes.
That was when reality first hit home.
The quoted prices were astronomical—from $180 to $320 per unit, with a Minimum Order Quantity of 500 pieces. No regular consumer would pay that; even I wouldn’t. But I really wanted to bring this idea to life. If manufacturing costs were going to swallow my dreams of bringing it to market, I wanted to have at least one piece, machined from a solid billet of stainless steel, for personal use. So, I paid a hefty $650 to 5-axis CNC one, thinking I could still figure out cheaper mass-production methods later on.
Check it out—doesn’t it look outstanding? A stainless steel shuriken to arm your coffee counter!
Excited to try it out, I assembled seven pairs of identical cups, then pulled a double-shot into the first pair. It worked beautifully. Espresso oozed onto the central dome, flowed down smoothly to collect in the outer-ringed valley, and dripped down the split spouts into their respective cups. Weighing the divided shots showed less than a gram’s difference between them. I was buzzing. I thought I just needed to find a factory to bring the costs down.
The 1-Millimeter Flaw
But with my next few pulls, reality struck again.
For some reason, the variance between the collected outputs in each cup suddenly grew massive—a two to four gram difference (e.g. 20g vs 16g). For specialty coffee, that is unacceptable. It was no better than eyeballing a shot with a chemistry beaker. Thinking my placement was at fault, I tried it again, and again, only to see inconsistent results. What was happening?
It was only as I cleaned up and inspected the two glass cups side-by-side that I noticed the reason. Even though these two cups were purchased as a pair and delivered in the same box, they were hand-blown and not exactly the same height. One was marginally shorter by a millimetre.
And because the stainless steel prototype was far heavier than earlier plastic ones, it would lean ever-so-slightly toward the shorter cup, completely biasing the fluid dynamics to cause uneven distribution.
Whilst I allowed myself to wallow in disappointment for a few days, I still had a problem I desperately wanted to solve. Could I pivot and find an alternative?
The Ultimate Pivot
My friend Shaun was the first to suggest a potential new path: "Instead of the splitter sitting on top of the cups—which brings cup variance into play—can we make a vessel that splits the espresso within itself?"
That train of thought led us to Splitshot as we know it today.
By collecting the espresso first, we could separate the splitting process from the brewing process. This makes it simpler to use: it would collect your espresso just like a cup, then seamlessly split a double-shot into perfectly equal single shots with a simple tilt. It was easy to use and entirely independent of your glassware choices.
Armed with this new idea and a fresh round of plastic 3D prints, I repeated my salesman journey to find a pathway toward manufacturing. My first choice was CNC machining, since it would guarantee the best finishing for stainless steel. But despite attempting complex, multi-stage set-ups, CNC didn’t prove viable, as the depth of Splitshot’s internal cavity caused unwanted harmonic vibrations at the milling bit, resulting in rough surfacing and poor consistency.
We then moved on to assess industrial 3D printing, but the costs for laser-sintering food-grade stainless steel were even more prohibitive. As it turned out, the material density and finishing quality we were targeting meant competing for time on high-end machines that would otherwise be printing precision components for aeronautical and pharmaceutical applications.
Biting the Bullet
After months of struggling, we finally pivoted to investment casting. Casting carried a higher financial risk up front, as committing to the tooling and mold-making costs offered no guarantee that the final product would meet our expectations. But because casting provided the only realistic path to lowering per-unit costs over time, we pursued it.
Over the next year, we had to make numerous revisions to the casting mold to improve surface roughness and structural consistency. But even after we had achieved structural stability, internal surface roughness still fell short of my expectations. I really wanted liquid retention to be no more than a gram. However, over several production samples, retention still hovered around two to three grams, despite us exhaustively testing a multitude of polishing methods. As a last resort, I bit the bullet to test the efficacy of a specialized, food-safe ceramic coating.
I’m glad to say it finally brought retention down to ~0.5 grams, even though it came with a scary price tag of an additional $20 per unit to apply. But it worked exactly as promised, and we were finally ready to proceed.
With Splitshot, I wanted to find an elegant solution for a relatively simple problem. There are so many occasions when I’d prefer a single shot—like sharing a quick espresso with my wife before we head out for a movie, or to serve piccolo lattes to my friends who are over for a late-night football game.
On all those occasions, I didn’t want to dig out my double-spouted portafilter or use the chemistry beaker. And I imagined, there must be others in the community who have felt the same way. If that resonates with you, I hope that Splitshot will get the opportunity to grace your coffee counter and serve you well.
Want to see how it all turned out?
• Check out the Splitshot espresso divider
• Explore our deep dive on YouTube
