The Clover Story: Holy Platinum Percolators! Stumptown’s $11,000 coffee makers
Posted by TheShot on 24 Feb 2007 | Tagged as: Café Society, Machine
This week Willamette Week (Portland, OR) reported on a new coffee maker — one that has been getting a ton of buzz in coffee aficionado circles — now in use at Portland’s Stumptown: Willamette Week Online | Post: ‘Holy Platinum Percolators! Stumptown’s $11,000 coffee makers’.
Made by Clover of Seattle, the uniqueness of its design is in providing custom time and temperature control that accentuates the unique properties of origin coffees on a per-customer/on-demand basis — something not easily done in a high volume retail environment. It apparently melds the properties of a French press and a vacuum pot. One of my favorite cafés in the world, Caffé Artigiano of Vancouver, BC, for example, has started using a Clover to brew their record-breaking Brazil Cup of Excellence coffee.
I don’t know of any Clovers in use in the Bay Area yet (the nearest one is currently in Portland), but I’ll report when I do. Many claim them to be the biggest breakthrough for brewed coffee in decades. Non-espresso brewed coffee is becoming interesting again.
An American Revolution
The article also mentioned the high-end espresso machines of Seattle-based Synesso. The article quotes a Synesso owner as saying that now “we’re making American espresso on American machines.” It’s a seemingly trite comment, but there has been something of a Western espresso succession from Italy underfoot for years now. I don’t mean in a Starbucks‘ faux-Italian-café kind of way, but rather in how North America has been creating the occasional superior, and far more obsessive, espresso than can be found as a general rule across Italy.
This month’s issue of Barista Magazine (”From Canada to Italy”, by Stephen Morrisey) underscores this experience — where Italian cafés consistently produce good, but not excellent, espresso, and North American cafés generally produce poor espresso with some stellar exceptions.
UPDATE: February 28, 2007
No surprise, given Ritual Coffee Roasters‘ original Stumptown roots. But word on the street is that Ritual has their Clover up and running today: Metroblogging San Francisco: Ritual & Clover.
UPDATE: March 3, 2007
Ritual has two Clovers set up at their front counter, but they still are not ready for prime-time. I visited this afternoon, and while there were two people on shift who could run the machines, they haven’t perfected the art to “go public” just yet.
UPDATE: Nov. 15, 2007
Proving that some think it is never too late to show up for a party, today The Economist published an article on the Clover machine from SF’s Ritual Coffee Roasters: Coffee | Move over, espresso | Economist.com.
4 Comments »
on 28 Feb 2007 at 11:01 am -05:00T 1.Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com » Vancouver, BC: The Elysian Room said …
[...] Yesterday Scott Beale, of SF’s Laughing Squid fame, posted on his visit to The Elysian Room in Vancouver: Laughing Squid » The Elysian Room. I too hear they make a mighty fine espresso (boy, am I overdue for a Vancouver espresso trek). They not only have a Clover, but they’re also a dealer. [...]
on 06 May 2007 at 4:36 pm -04:00T 2.Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com » The First “Blogging” Coffeemaker said …
[...] Apparently, one of the reigning media fads is still blogging. Last year we witnessed “coffee for bloggers” (no, I am not making this up). This year, we apparently have “blogging” coffee makers — thanks to the otherwise credible Clover brewer: PRESS RELEASE The First “Blogging” Coffeemaker: The Coffee Equipment Company Launches CloverNet(TM). But upon reading the press release, you quickly realize that by “blogging” they really mean basic data transmission. This is akin to NASA saying that the Mars Explorer is busy blogging from the surface of the Red Planet. [...]
on 07 May 2007 at 8:02 pm -04:00T 3.Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com » Good coffee just might earn your restaurant that extra Michelin star said …
[...] Yesterday Atlanta’s The Sunday Paper published an article on Batdorf & Bronson, an artisinal coffee roaster in Olympia, WA who supplies a number of top-rated restaurants in the Atlanta area, as well as cafés and retailers such as Whole Foods Market: 05/06/07 FOOD: Zen and the art of coffee roasting > SundayPaper.com > Current Articles. Batdorf & Bronson also has roasting facilities in Atlanta, and they are preparing to open up their own retail space in “Hotlanta,” as the locals say (or, “Mylanta,” as I would say). And yes, it will come with the obligatory Clover brewer. [...]
on 11 May 2007 at 6:47 pm -04:00T 4.Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com » Clover Brewer Review: at Ritual Coffee Roasters, Bayview said …
[...] You’ve read the review on Ritual Coffee Roasters’ new Bayview location. But at long last, I finally got to sample one of the few Clover brewer machines in the Bay Area while visiting. Word has it that the Clover brewer was probably the most talked about subject at last week’s SCAA conference. Given how long it’s been since non-espresso, brewed coffee got some serious love and attention, and given the resulting cup the Clover produces, I’d say the buzz is warranted. [...]