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<!--pageType= magazinewideslug= mf_cloversection= gadgetssubsection= miscellaneousheadline= The Coffee Fix: Can the $11,000 Clover Machine Save StarbucksauthorName= Mathew HonancreditType= photocredit= RJ Shaughnessycaption= The Clover coffee machine will be installed in 80 Starbucks by the end of 2008.-->It's 10 am on a Thursday, and the line at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco snakes out the door. Inside, an espresso machine hisses like an angry tomcat as customers order their cappuccinos. But the real action is taking place a few steps away, where a scruffy barista stands at a stainless steel contraption, introducing the coffee he's about to serve to his rapt audience. "The Honduran is sweet," he says, "with a refined acidity and an excellent finish." He lets one perfectly measured scoop of fresh grounds shimmy deep into the machine, then goes to work, twiddling knobs, pushing buttons, and whirling a whisk in a chamber at the top of the silver box.Forty-five seconds later, he sets down a single cup of custom-made coffee that's Jessica Alba hot, Bill Gates rich, and as unique as a snowflake. No foam. No caramel. No whip. Just beans and water — pushed through a cool little machine called the Clover — for a pricey $4 a pop.The Clover coffeemaker debuted in a handful of cafés in 2006 and was promptly hailed as the best thing to happen to coffee lovers since the car cup holder. With an $11,000 asking price, the Clover has become a fetish object among the coffee-obsessed. Long queues signal its arrival in new cities, and self-described "Cloveristas" post videos on YouTube demonstrating the machine's flashy brewing process. There are more photos on Flickr paying homage to this shiny gadget 700 and counting than actual Clovers in existence roughly 250 worldwide.Writer Mathew Honan tries out the Clover machine at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco.For more, visit video.wired.com.The Clover also wowed Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks. Last year, Schultz stumbled upon the machine in New York City when he had spotted a line of people standing outside a tiny joint called Café Grumpy. He tried a sample and declared it "the best cup of brewed coffee I have ever tasted." In March 2008, Starbucks announced the acquisition of the Coffee Equipment Company — the Seattle-based startup that manufactures Clovers in a converted trolley shed. His hope is that the Clover will bolster Starbucks' bottom line.Chalk up some of the excitement — and the equipment's hefty price tag — to artisanal tech. A robotic hybrid of a French press and a Dirt Devil, the Clover is the first coffeemaker that lets the user program three key variables: dose, water temperature, and brew time. Example: 37.5 grams of Brazilian Fazenda São João at 204 degrees for 43 seconds. After the coffee steeps, a piston mechanism extracts the liquid from spent beans, resulting in a fresh cuppa in less than a minute. A filter platform pops a hockey puck of grounds out of the top, where it's easily wiped away. An Ethernet port connected to an online database is designed to let users save favorite recipes for specific beans. Made of stainless steel and copper, a single Clover typically takes several hours to assemble by hand. Fast, fancy, and idiot-proof No surprise that Starbucks is all over the Clover — the company has been rolling them out since last summer. Half-caf nonfat toffee-nut latte lovers, get ready for a real cup of coffee.I'm a coffee achiever, as that old ad campaign goes. I own two French presses, a stainless steel Cuisinart grinder/drip, a retro De'Longhi espresso machine, an Italian Vev Vigano moka pot, and a Vietnamese drip that I purchased in old Hanoi for making ca phe sua nong. My San Francisco neighborhood has five coffee shops within a five-block radius: four mom-and-pop operations and a Peet's. But compared with David Latourell, CEC's 42-year-old resident coffee expert, I'm a Sanka-slurping rube.Latourell and I are standing in the middle of CEC's cupping room, a tasting area next to the company's small Seattle factory. The Clover is specifically designed to bring out the nuances of high-end coffees like Los Delirios, which comes from a Portland, Oregon, company called Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Los Delirios is a blend of Caturra, Typica, and Bourbon beans grown near Esteli, Nicaragua. Actually, it's on a micro lot located at 13° 22'45.99"N x 86° 28'50.45"W, between 1,050 and 1,450 meters above sea level, according to a manila "origin" card that comes with each bag of beans. Underneath the farm's GPS coordinates are flavor descriptions that read in part, "violets and black cherry, baking chocolate, and chocolate covered raisins."Latourell hands me a cup of Los Delirios coffee made in the Clover. We both take slow, even sips. "I'm picking up a little chocolate," he says with a toss of his shoulder-length hair. I sip again, summoning every taste bud. I just taste — well, coffee. Delicious, sure, but coffee.Like wine and, more recently, chocolate, a quality coffee bean must reflect a certain terroir — the climate, soil composition, and elevation of its place of origin. At least in theory, this gives a bean its unique and desirable flavor. Whether or not your average caffeine fiend can tell a Guatemalan Maragogype bean from a Honduran Catuai is debatable, but terroir explains how Stumptown can sell bags of beans for $40 a pound about 10 times the price of commercial-grade coffee and cafés can charge from $3 to $7 for a single cup of joe. "For $7, you can get a bad glass of wine," says CEC cofounder Randy Hulett. "Or you can get one of the best cups of coffee in the world."Illustration: Jameson SimpsonClover, From the Grounds UpClover looks like just another countertop coffee machine. But peek under the hood and you'll find an innovative brewing system. Here's how it works: 1. A barista selects dose, water temperature, and steep time. 2. A piston pulls down the filter platform while freshly ground coffee is poured into the chamber. 3. Hot water flows into the chamber. 4. The barista briskly stirs the grounds with a whisk, and the water and beans steep for several seconds. 5.The piston rises, creating a vacuum that separates the brew from the grounds, then lowers, forcing the joe out of a nozzle below. 6. The piston rises to the surface again, pushing up a disc of grounds, which are squeegeed away.Then there's the top-shelf stuff. Stumptown sells beans from Nicaragua called Las Golondrinas for $80 a pound. On the international market, Esmeralda Special, a rare kind of Panamanian bean, can go for $130 a pound wholesale. And consider Kopi Luwak, also known as catshit coffee: It's an Indonesian bean that's eaten by a civet cat, then "harvested" from the animal's dung. The bean's bitter flavor is apparently greatly improved by passing through a cat's digestive tract. A single cup of Kopi Luwak at the Peter Jones espresso bar in London goes for $100, and a pound of the beans can cost as much as $600.If you're going to pay that much for beans, of course, you want to have the right machine. Back in the cupping room, Latourell fires up the Clover and goes to work on a second cup of Los Delirios: He measures out 46 grams of beans, grinds them, and then slides them into the recessed chamber on top. Next, he programs a new brew time and temperature, raising the heat from 205 degrees to 207 and increasing the brewing time from 45 seconds to 50. As the hot water rushes into the chamber from a topside nozzle, Latourell stirs the blend with a metal whisk, being careful not to break the stream, which would cool the water. "The temperature has a massive effect on the extraction of chemicals that affect flavor," he explains.I take a swig. Bang, there it is: chocolate. Scharffen Berger, eat your heart out! A few tweaks and I have a new beverage. And it's not just the chocolate flavor; the mouthfeel and acidity are completely different from the first cup. All Latourell did was adjust the brew time and temperature and add 6 grams of beans. Taste-testing it against the earlier brew, I wouldn't have guessed they were the same bean. I'm starting to become a Clover convert.Photo: RJ ShaughnessyBrewed coffee is awful.That's what Zander Nosler thought back in 2001, when he was developing a commercial coffeemaker for — of all places — Starbucks. The bespectacled, rail-thin product designer had previously spent 18 months at Ideo developing everything from sunglasses to medical supplies. As he tinkered with a revolutionary single-serve, push-button brewing machine targeted for the workplace, he realized that most makers were as stale as the coffee. "I got to see firsthand how coffee was better by the cup," Nosler says. "The coffee coming out of those glass office pots is wretched." Starbucks later called the prototype the Interactive Cup. When the project was finished, Nosler kept thinking about the single-brew concept. He soon decided he could do better, making a superior brewer that wasn't one-size-fits-all.By 2004, Nosler had cooked up a business plan. He recruited other Stanford alums, including Hulett, 34. Within a year, the team raised half a million dollars from friends and family and set up shop inside an old trolley shed a few minutes north of downtown Seattle. The Coffee Equipment Company was born.For months, the group reworked the design. They abandoned the office market in favor of cafés, ditched the grinder, and shrunk the countertop footprint. By spring 2005 they had the first Clover prototype. Code name: Chalupa. Made |
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