An $11,000 coffeemaker that brews one cup at a time! There are only about 200 Clovers in existance so far, but their popularity is taking off at coffeehouses around the US.
If that’s not enough, the first $20,000 siphon coffeemaker was recently imported from Japan for the Blue Bottle Café in San Francisco. Read about both these new brewing methods in this article from the New York Times. Link -via Geek Like Me
(image credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)
Designed by three Stanford graduates, it lets the user program every feature of the brewing process, including temperature, water dose and extraction time. (It even has an Ethernet connection that can feed a complete record of its configurations to a Web database.) Not only is each cup brewed to order, but the way each cup is brewed can be tailored to a particular bean — light or dark roast, acidic or sweet, and so on.
The Clover works something like an inverted French press: coffee grounds go into a brew chamber, hot water shoots in and a powerful piston slowly lifts and plunges a filter, forcing the coffee out through a nozzle in the front. The final step, when a cake of spent grounds rises majestically to the top, is so titillating to coffee fanatics that one of them posted a clip of it on YouTube.
If that’s not enough, the first $20,000 siphon coffeemaker was recently imported from Japan for the Blue Bottle Café in San Francisco. Read about both these new brewing methods in this article from the New York Times. Link -via Geek Like Me
(image credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)
I really don't have a problem with professionals paying outrageous amounts for equipment. It's an investment, and other restaurant cooking gear can cost as much. To compete for the many customers these machines will serve, you have to have an edge. If someone paid that much for a personal brewing system, I would think they are nuts.
But ... I just looked at YouTube for one of those aforementioned videos of Clover coffee. The process is lovely, the coffee looks delicious. But then they poured the brew into an ol' plastic cup. A PLASTIC CUP! For heaven's sake, is there any better way to ruin even the most average coffee than using a frickin' plastic cup for it??
Heretics!