I have raved about Starbucks’ Clover Brewed machine in the past. The history is that Starbucks’ corp acquired Clover a few years back and took Clovers’ $12,000 vacuum machine that brews exceptional coffee completely off the market. Only a few independent coffee houses remain that have Clover machines and I hear you can buy one for a high price on eBay.
It is also a long and ongoing saga that Starbucks’ coffee sucks. I disagree but I also don’t prepare coffee drip-style as they do in the stores. At home, I have 4 different brewing methods. My favorite is the Chemex method and I use Starbucks reserve coffees and other special brews as well as a few misc. coffees from roasters like Blue Bottle and Philz. I also utilize a pour-over ceramic style for single cups but I rarely just drink one cup so this isn’t really utilized often. Finally, I have a French Press system that I like but, for the time it takes, I’d rather just use the Chemex.
Pour-over style coffee is a work of art. It takes the absolute perfect grind paired with perfect measurement of grounds per cup and and the perfect level of water. The beans must be ground immediately before brewing and the way you pour the water is also crucial. For the past year, I’ve been making coffee at home. At 19, we had a drip coffee maker but, upon moving to San Francisco, it was easier to just hop down to any one of the hundreds of coffee shops. When I decided to start relying on my own cooking skills in March of last year, I decided to start making coffee at home. Interestingly enough, it took me until just recently for my home coffee to be good enough that I’d serve it to guests. Trust me, the sludge at the bottom of the cup, watery or too strong cups of coffee that had bits of grinds in them and a burnt flavor was something that bothered me but, eventually, I got the skill down to where every single cup is absolutely perfect.
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A story today on Gizmodo excited me to the point of writing this post. Believe it or not, I don’t blog about everything that enters my head. I just don’t have enough hours in the day.
Not many people know this but Starbucks offers pour-over coffee any time of day, every day of the year. It’s mostly offered if they just ran out of coffee and are brewing more but you can ask for pour-over coffee at any time but I don’t recommend it. The barista has to be really good to get it right and they rarely will freshly ground the beans for you.
It turns out that Starbucks is testing out a robot to make coffee for you and I see this as a good thing. Knowing how long it took me to get pour-over coffee right and how bad it can taste both at home and in various coffee shops, I think this is a great idea. They’re building clover machines with an add-on. I’m just going to copy the Gizmodo article because they said it best. You can read the full article here.
The nerd-standard in your average nerdy coffee shop is regular coffee, brewed by hand. A pourover: A barista slowly whirls a kettle over a Hario V60 cone ora Chemex, in neatly orchestrated concentric circles. I’ve had some amazing pourovers, but I’d had even more shitty ones.
The coffee’s often underextracted, even in typically great shops—and that’s not surprising when you’ve got one barista trying to handle five hand-crafted coffees simultaneously with only his two hands. Consistency is hard. It requires care, man. Unless you’re a robot. Like Starbucks’ Clover Precision Pourover machine.
Right now, there is only one of these machines in the whole world. It’s at Roy St. Coffee & Tea in Seattle, which is actually a Starbucks coffee lab hidden in plain sight. (It is, very seriously, the best Starbucks in the whole world, perhaps the only one that is a legitimatelygood coffee shop.) The Clover Precision Pourover machine was built by the dudes who developed the Clover, a $12,000 precision coffee-brewing machine. It, like the original Clover, is designed to solve one of the hardest problems in brewing coffee: You guessed it, consistency.
There are a lot of things that go into attempting to produce a consistent, perfect pourover every single brew: dealing withwater temperature stability; precisely timing each step of the pouring process; replicating the same pour motions every time. Perfect production isn’t something humans are great at, though skilled baristas come close. (Here’show an Intelligentsia barista does a V60 pourover, along with Wrecking Ball Coffee’s Nick Cho, for comparison.)
A robot, on the other hand, is very good at doing things the exact same way every single time. The Clover Pourover’s circles are unwaveringly identical. Its timing is ultra-precise, the metered rhythm determined by countless experiments in Starbucks’ development labs. The water temperature is accurate and stable to a tenth of a degree. All the barista has to do is provide the correct dose of freshly ground coffee, ensure it’s properly distributed in the filter, and press a button. The machine does the rest. And while it’s using a single brew profile for every coffee right now, because it’s a networked device, Starbucks could produce and upload extremely tailored programming for coffees based on their origin or roast date or whatever.
As much as I hate the way Starbucks has systematically removed the human element, craft, from making coffee in virtually all of its 10,000+ stores, replacing them with pure technology and engineering, the simple fact is that the the El Salvador Pacamara Montecarlos Estate in my cup brewed by the Clover Precision Pourover was more delicious and better-balanced than a lot of the pourovers produced for me by humans.
Much to my surprise, I had a better pourover a week later at Sweetleaf in Long Island City. It’s the best one I’ve had in a long time, in fact. It was made by a guy who’s made a ton of pourovers. But he was so invested in that one cup, he bordered on nerve-wracked, like he was about to kiss a girl for the first time. Even though the cup was perfect, moments later, heconsulted a machine to make even more sure he was making them correctly.
Not everybody’s going to do that. Especially not every barista in every Starbucks. Which is what makes the Clover Pourover a potentially revolutionary piece of equipment, and a twinkle in Starbucks Senior Design Project Manager Major Cohen’s eye. (A weird Starbucks contradiction: The people who run the place, like Cohen, really do love coffee, even if the guy blending your Frappuccino at the local ‘bucks doesn’t.)
So, take a machine that produces legit good, individually brewed coffee, every single time. Now imagine a wall of three or four or five of these in every Starbucks. Mass produced, manually brewed coffee that’s actually good. (At least as long as the coffee dumped in them is good; and that may be stretch at the average Starbucks, considering many of their coffees are charred to death by hellfire and delivered many weeks after roasting. But anyway.) It’s a wild thought, that one day soon you might be able to walk into any Starbucks and get a seriously decent cup of coffee, brewed to order. But robots have done crazier things.
Sounds pretty cool!!!!
Of course, this may never make its way to Starbucks’ stores. Even Clover machines are rare. There are only 20 Clover machines in the bay area and 30 in the entire state of Massachusetts. Let’s forget about robot powered pour-over machines, we still need Clover in stores around the nation. Clover and the pour-over method costs more so Starbucks is only sending out the $12,000 machines to stores that make the most money each year. That makes sense.
I hope this comes to a Starbucks near me. Actually, I hope a Starbucks comes near me at all. I’m still over an hour from the nearest Starbucks here in New Hampshire and can’t possibly afford a clover machine any time soon. $12,000 is the price of a new Kia. Sheesh.
I’d get a Kia instead