There are methods of home brewing that will produce as good or better results than the clover if you’re willing to take the time to go through some trial and error and master a brew method and are willing to invest in a good burr grinder. The Clover’s magic is that it does its thing in under a minute - but the four minutes it takes me to make my usual awesome cup in the morning is just fine. Vac-pots are one fussy but rewarding path to take… I’m personally fond of the Eva Solo.

There is always the slim possibility that SBUX will miraculously get some properly roasted higher quality beans into their shops. Unlikely so long as the company culture remains more about selling Starbucks than about selling coffee.

How about this: What if SBUX provided a service where the customer provides the beans and SBUX makes a “Clover” cup out of them? I’m a Chicagoan and get my beans from either Metropolis or Intelligentsia. I buy a pound a week for my wife and me, but will never get to enjoy them as a Clover-ized drink. I’d pay $3.00 (more than a Grande Pike Place Roast, but less than a capp or latte) for the service especially if I get to put the brew in my own travel mug. Whaddya think about that? Cool? Stupid? Indifferent?

I’ve got a couple of bags of green Wailua peaberry and am looking for a profile to roast… any suggestions?

I’m with the others… it’s nice to have you back from exile.

And I am with you on the impact of this sale. There’s more than one way to differentiate yourself from Starbucks, and relying on a piece of equipment to do the job for you is kind of, well, Starbucksian.

On an another note, I have a well-founded but irrational dislike of Howard Schulz that stems from my rampant Seattle homerism. I don’t like being associated with his giant chain business, considering he is from New York, not Seattle. And I REALLY resent him selling the SuperSonics to an out-of-town concern. He came in with a lot of rhetoric about “restoring a winning tradition” and then drove the team into the ground and bailed when he wasn’t making a big enough profit (he made plenty on the sale, though). Leave my city alone, you jerk!

This has nothing to do with the Clover, except that he has related a story in public about trying Clovered coffee in New York and, unless he is making that up, I am almost positive he had that cup off a Clover that I installed at Grumpy.

As an indie shop owner with a Clover- I was pretty surprised by the news. We serve Intelli coffee on ours and I have to say that the control the Clover has given us has greatly elevated our understanding of how the different brewing variables combine to produce different characteristics in the cup. For our baristas it was just as important as our upgrade from a HX espresso machine to a Synesso, which has given us a platform of stability upon which to further hone our craft.

We offered a press menu in our shop before the Clover, but found in the retail environment that 4-6 minutes wait time from ordering a coffee wasn’t acceptable to most customers. With the Clover, however, the gee-whiz factor of it entertained customers while we alternately talked about brewing technology and the coffee they were about to enjoy. As a former engineer, I have no issue talking about technology and quite frankly it’s fun to do. I am equally excited telling customers about direct trade or how a certain coffee is going to taste as it cools. In my opinion if the customers are focusing on the craft, science or the beans it’s infinitely better than serving “regular coffee”. You can’t cover everything in a single 60 second chat… people’s heads would explode.

I posted these thoughts on CG in the neverending Pittsburgh coffee bar thread the day I found out…

*If someone offered us a boatload of cash for our business- we would probably sell and then go out and either do this all again somewhere else or do something else we’re passionate about. Everyone has a price.

*We will not see new Clovers for sale much longer. If you want one beyond that you’ll have to get one of the first couple hundred “used” machines

*Parts will continue to be available (and I may stockpile some just to be safe) to existing Clover users

*Starbucks will continue to serve over-roasted carbon flavored coffee. We sell a fair amount of Intelli’s “El Diablo” from the Clover and it is pretty darned good, but it’s kind of like a gateway coffee to the single origins. We stand behind our coffee and how we’re preparing it and still feel that for the retail environment the Clover is the best way to present these wonderful coffees.

*Starbucks will not ruin customers for the Clover, just as they haven’t ruined customers for airpot brewers or even espresso drinks for that matter… they’ll just ruin their Clovers in how they misuse them.

*Another entrepreneurial type will come along with the next round of equipment and the whole process starts again.

*We will continue to tweak and play with ours, improve the quality of our techniques, and be a rarity in the area. Based on our returns ours will be paid off before the warranty is up.

I think you’ll see some DIY alternatives appear… some people will screw around with fussy vacpots which deliver similar wow factor and potentially great brew, others will design better pour over solutions… and there remain some entirely unexplored options.

To your other point, the challenges for indies run a lot deeper than what consumer perception of their equipment is. Its not just that brewing on a clover takes finesse. I think the often disappointing clover experiences out there are merely indicative of the general disappointing output of many coffee roasters that enjoy reputations that have more to do with online cheerleading than their actual skill at delivering a great finished product. The clover merely revealed a fresh avenue for (a long absent) critique. Thats a rant for another day though, still a bit in the future.

But my response was that if Clover has hit the big time, it’s likely that Clover competitors will start coming out of the woodwork. Clover has a barista’s barista mentality to it now — not meant to be derogatory, same as a comedian’s comedian — but with the machines in all Starbucks, other coffee engineers will come up with alternatives for independents and small chains.

Right?