Brew Watches: The NYC Microbrand Built on an Espresso Timer

Feature

Jonathan Ferrer launched Brew on Kickstarter in 2015 with an espresso-timer chronograph; eleven years on, the New York brand’s 1,000-piece Metric Chrono Taxi goes on sale on 19 October.

Chronographs usually come with a heroic back story: race laps, flight times, the regatta countdown on Citizen’s Promaster Wave Tracker. Brew’s come with a coffee order. Since its first watch in 2015, Jonathan Ferrer’s New York brand has built its chronographs around the 25 to 35 seconds it takes to pull an espresso shot, and its latest, the Metric Chrono Taxi, was made for this year’s Windup Watch Fair in Manhattan (16–18 October).

We haven’t handled a Brew yet, so sizes and details here come from the brand’s specifications and official photos.

The espresso window on the dial

Brew colours the stretch of the chronograph seconds scale between 25 and 35 seconds, which on most of its chronographs sits between five and seven o’clock. Start the chronograph with the pump, and if the hand is inside that section when you stop the shot, you’re in the range Brew designed around.

Ferrer has said the idea came from his local coffee shop, where he noticed baristas starting a digital timer for every shot. The Metric adds an older reference: Gear Patrol traced its concept to 1930s telephone-timer chronographs, which marked the three-minute point of a pay-phone call.

Worn & Wound made a fair point when the LED Digital Blend arrived last year: most owners don’t buy a Brew to time coffee, any more than people buy a tachymeter to measure speed. The window is a signature first and a tool second, and it costs the watch nothing, because the chronograph still times anything up to an hour.

How Ferrer built Brew on USD 1,000

Ferrer studied industrial design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he now teaches, and found his way into watches through an internship at Movado. Before Brew he designed licensed watches for brands including Under Armour and Nike. The trade runs in the family: according to Europa Star, his father worked as a jeweller for Tiffany and his grandfather designed jewellery for Cartier.

He started Brew with USD 1,000, he told Europa Star in 2023, and took it to Kickstarter in spring 2015 with the Special Blend, a quartz chronograph whose case borrowed the sculpted steel of commercial espresso machines. The campaign beat its USD 35,000 goal. The follow-up, a more conservative three-hand date series, lost money, and Ferrer has since described it as too cautious.

The turn came in 2018 with the Retrograph, a rectangular chronograph on a Seiko meca-quartz movement that, Europa Star reported, brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ferrer’s lesson was that the more of his own style came through in a design, “the more successful they are”. The Metric followed in 2021, unveiled at a pop-up in SoHo, and has been the brand’s flagship since.

What makes Brew a New York brand

Brew describes its watches as designed and crafted in New York City. The supply chain behind that is wider. When Ferrer spoke to Europa Star in 2023, Brew used Seiko and Sellita movements, imported cases and bracelets from Asia and assembled the watches in Arizona; his stated aim was to bring cases, bracelets, assembly and servicing to New York.

The same year, retailers voted Brew American Watch Brand of the Year at the first WatchPro USA Awards in New York, a result WatchPro itself found notable because Brew sells direct, through its own website and the Windup fairs. Ferrer also announced plans for a Manhattan boutique, to run as a concept store serving local coffee. In 2025 the brand ran two pop-ups in SoHo, one in February and a summer-long one a few blocks away, and that August the Japanese retailer TiCTAC started selling Brew at its Ikebukuro Parco store in Tokyo, which Japanese press described as the brand’s first permanent point of sale.

The city also shows up on the dials. At Windup in October 2025, Brew offered the Metric New York Limited Edition: three Metrics with dials based on the terrazzo floors of subway cars, each colour tied to a subway line, with the skyline on the caseback, 50 pieces per colour at USD 677.

This year’s New York piece is louder. The Metric Chrono Taxi pairs a taxi-yellow outer track with a matte black dial, runs a checkered stripe through the centre and repeats the pattern on the chronograph seconds hand and the polished caseback, where it frames Brew’s coffee-bean logo. “New York” sits at six o’clock. It’s limited to 1,000 pieces at USD 495, USD 20 more than a regular steel Metric, and goes on sale on Brew’s website on Monday 19 October at 10am ET. Case dimensions and movement match the regular Metric’s.

The Metric family and the Retrograph

The Metric is the template for most of what Brew sells today. Its steel cushion case is 36mm wide, 41.5mm from lug to lug and 10.75mm thick, with an integrated bracelet, a sapphire crystal and 50m of water resistance. On paper that makes it a compact chronograph, and the 41.5mm lug-to-lug is the figure to check against your wrist; Brew also offers a printable 1:1 template.

Inside is Seiko’s VK68, a meca-quartz chronograph: quartz keeps the time, a mechanical module runs the chronograph, and one battery powers both, for two to four years according to Brew. The brand sells it as quartz accuracy with the feel of a mechanical chronograph, and the slim movement helps keep the case at 10.75mm. Steel Metrics cost USD 475. The Super Metric uses the same case and movement with anodised aluminium pushers and a finely textured dial with recessed square subdials, also at USD 475.

The Metric Lite shrinks the design to 30mm wide and 34mm lug to lug, 10.55mm thick, and swaps the chronograph for a three-hand automatic, Miyota’s 6T27. It’s a small calibre with 21 jewels, a 4Hz (28,800vph) beat and about 40 hours of power reserve, and the Lite costs USD 375.

The Metric Digital Blend, launched in September 2025, takes the espresso idea literally. Below the hands sits a red LED display that counts down 30 seconds at the push of a button, then shows a percolating coffee cup; Brew calls it the first hybrid watch to pair analogue timekeeping with a digital espresso timer. The case grows to 37.5mm by 43mm and 13mm thick, and the price is USD 425. The countdown is fixed at 30 seconds, though, while a regular Metric times up to an hour.

The Retrograph is still in the catalogue, at 38mm wide, 41.5mm long and 10.4mm thick, on a 22mm strap and with a meca-quartz chronograph movement. The Espresso version, in rose-gold PVD with a chocolate sunburst dial, costs USD 375.

Eleven years on, Brew’s watches still start at the coffee machine. Now they also come with a taxi-yellow stripe and a New York postcode.

Prices are Brew’s US web-store prices in US dollars, checked on 17 October 2026.