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I finished posting photos from my amazing April trip to Guatemala where I met facilitators and producers from a project working on quality improvement for small coffee farmers in Huehuetenango, funded by Slow Food.

Starbucks buying Clover is becoming a publicity boon to “third wave” coffee. Nearly all of the many articles that have appeared about the move advance one or more of the fundamental conceits of the quality coffee movement.

I attended the Specialty Coffee Association of America annual conference in Minneapolis. As always it provided a fascinating snapshot in time of an industry in ever-increasing flux as well as a chance to connect and reconnect with the many beautiful people that make it move. Some photos here.

My friend and frequent coconspirator Kyle Glanville is the new US barista champion, edging out some well matched competitors in what might have been the tightest game this weird sport has seen yet. As a “prize” for his victory, his face will appear on thousands of bottles of vanilla flavored syrup. In June he’ll take his shtick to the WBC in Copenhagen. There is a slim chance I’ll be in attendance if flights magically become cheaper as the date approaches.

Michaele Weissman, who wrote one of the seminal articles on the new models of relationship coffees a couple years back, has a new book out God in a Cup The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee which chronicles the quixotic efforts of some familiar names in the trade and asks some intriguing questions. It deserves a proper review here once I’ve fully digested it, but for now let me tell you that she is a great storyteller and if you’re a reader of this blog its probably right up your alley. You should also check out her recently launched blog.

I’m part of a cabal of coffee folks attempting to deliver a best-of-class coffee tasting experience to attendees of this year’s inaugural Slow Food Nation event labor day weekend in San Francisco. The scale of the event will present some compelling challenges - I’ll be writing more about this as the date approaches.

Emily and I are looking to move back home to Seattle in the Fall (before the gas shortages kick in and Los Angeles goes all Mad Max on us). Before we go, there’ll be a blog post or two of my favorite things in L.A., a city I’ve come to dig despite my initial resistance.

I have a number of professional itches I’d like to scratch, and am working on a project that will encompass many of them. Stay tuned.

Yesterday, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz took the stage at their annual meeting announcing five new initiatives and -aping an Apple stevenote- a surprise “one more thing”… Starbucks has purchased Seattle’s Coffee Equipment Company, maker of the Clover. While the event (broadcast live on SBUX website) lacked the polish of Apple, you have to credit them for making some strides since ’05’s knee-deep in the mocha.

People have been asking me for my take on this so I thought it a good excuse to dust off my keyboard and crawl out from my self-imposed blogging exile. In short, I’m happy for Clover founders Zander Nosler and Randy Hulett and their dedicated crew who bravely took up a concept that was less than obvious and persisted to create a game changing product. Having it embraced by the green giant is a level of validation that would be hard to top.

Three years ago I had the privilege of being one of the first geeks to play with the Clover technology early in its development phase and I was honored to participate in its unveiling (including writing this exuberant post on the original victrola blog).

Unveiling of the Clover prototype at the Victrola speakeasy during Coffeefest Seattle ‘05. David Latourell becomes the first Clover barista during demo day at the Vic.

Since then I’ve witnessed many people go from absolute skepticism to embracing (and exploiting) the Clover. The Clover made it possible to give customers access to a breadth of coffee experiences (once typically confined to cupping labs) yet do so in a high-volume coffeebar environment. It opened the door to more coffee menu variety, vertical pricing, and contributed to a renewed appreciation for brewed coffee which had been eclipsed by espresso beverages in the hearts of many customers.

In many ways the Clover’s novelty as a technological gizmo and the mesmerizing theater of its rapid brewing process has come to overshadow the beans that go into it. Press reports tend to fixate on its $11k price tag, actually quite unremarkable when compared to the cost of myriad espresso machines, grinders, NSF approved refrigerators, dish sanitizers, and other less glamorous tools of the trade. An argument could be made that part of the value of owning a Clover has been that the machine differentiates a shop from chains like SBUX, but to my mind its time the narrative moved beyond “gee-whiz fancy high tech” and back to the bean. The premise and true promise of the Clover was always to highlight the coffee, and maybe this news takes us another step in that direction.

Were Howard Schultz to read some of the overly presumptuous grumblings of certain coffee “professionals” in the forums, I can only imagine him turning to Zander and saying “how’d you ever do business with these clowns?” Detractors aside, I’m sure the coming months will be a strange trip for the CoEqCo crew, but my hunch is that this was not a deal that they entered into lightly. Existing Clover customers will continue to have access to parts and support, but future availability of the machines is in doubt.

The sky isn’t falling so much as the ground is slowly rising. Whether or not Starbucks’ initiatives will manifest as any leap in quality in their cups remains to be seen (I’m skeptical), but their renewed effort on marketing coffee should be welcomed by small roasters. Schultz speculated in his presentation that some people might even be tempted to [gasp] start drinking coffee black, no sugar. If that’s the meme SBUX wants to push, I’m confident that it will be quality-focused microroasters that reap the most benefit over the long term.