you’ve got someone involved in the clover’s formation, someone who has one as a personal toy (!), someone who has drunk the drinks as a consumer and someone who is far removed from the clover’s reach.

commonalities: it’s primarily a consciousness-raiser, NOT a taste-vehicle. fascinating.

which, again, obviously isn’t a bad thing. a consciousness of the possibilities is huge, and that would appear to be the machine’s chief value. doesn’t mean the brew is always good, and it definitely doesn’t mean starbucks is gonna do the system justice.

but we’ll see. thanks for the visit, grendel. i have a special affinity for that name.

However, since I don’t have a Clover to draw in the crowds I’ll just have to keep serving up the good stuff wherever I can – one person at a time.

the nuance has long passed, but as stale beans go it was nice.

The best cup I had from a Clover was from David in their lab, George Howell’s Mamuto, brewed at 212F with the jacket running 10F higher than production models. Clean, crips, fresh, lively red fruits (not the weird ferment fruit that is popular at the moment, and I understand it and its appeal/usage/potential for converting cusomters but can’t always cope with) and a very memorable cup. (Superfine filter on there as well). Nothing has come close to that cup for me, which isn’t quite right.

Which Collective Brew you got on?

i don’t doubt clover’s value financially, or its worth re-grabbing attention for the coffee itself. when you get into leveraged taste, however, how often does the product stay pure (i.e drinkable, yummy) amidst all the leverage?

rarely, it seems to me. you sort of end up with mediocrity that feels better — that self satisfies.

ultimately, it’s still a barista-manned machine.

I feel like, by omission, I have downplayed the challenges of getting good results off the clover. Its a combination of wanting to avoid taking on every dumptruck load of flamebait Jay paints the boards with and a desire not to name names among the many shops who I feel suck at clover-ing and/or have weak beans to begin with. My best diplomacy for awhile has been to simply keep my mouth shut.

I’m privy to some of the real numbers from shops that have deployed Clover, and there is no question that for those shops it has been a home run on the bottom line.

Again, on the issue of pricetag (and we are genuinely beating a horse that is both dead and buried, but nonetheless)… if you plan on opening a shop by the skin of your pants in a small town and you want to make every dollar count and you’re in a municipality with lax codes on construction/health dept, and you’d be thrilled to do even 100 transactions a day – an $11k coffeemaker is probably an extravagance. However, if you are opening on a busy street, in a big city, with a big investment in construction/code compliance and pushing 500-1000 transactions a day… different math.

It also depends on what you want to sell. The typical “coffee shop” is essentially drink agnostic – chai, lattes, coffee, whatever. Comfy couches and beverages with enough margin to pay the bills. For a shop that is really “about the coffee” on a fundamental business level (and not merely as some pretense of the staff who want to project some meaning into their stupid jobs) then investing in equipment that serves to put coffee at center stage makes real sense.

Anyway, I’m blathering. It must be this 3-week old Coffee Collective brew I’m chugging. Though faded, it is pretty nifty to be drinking stuff roasted by pals in another hemisphere.