"This is Zummo's Café—Pennsylvania's, and perhaps America's, best coffee shop." If you're the sort of person that doesn’t know why they should visit Scranton, Pennsylvania—except to see if the Dunder Mifflin office really exists—I'm here to help. Imagine you're lost in a sort of run down neighborhood. You spot a café, and pull over. It’s across the street from a church, down the street from a storefront courtroom, Catholic school, and rectory and in an old wood-frame house. A police car is parked outside and construction workers are having a smoke out front. What do you expect? Plastic-wrapped danishes? Week-old doughnuts? At least you'll get directions. When you walk in though, you notice the Clover machine. Yeah, they make coffee...
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Starbucks is trying out its new Clover brewing system in Beantown. The Clover is the $11,000 coffee machine that uses vacuum-press technology and computerized brewing cycles custom-calibrated to bean type to make single-pour cups of joe. The machine is lauded by coffee geeks, who say it brings out subtle flavors that are masked by conventional brewing methods. The Boston Globe says about 30 Starbucks locations in the Boston area will get the units for testing, debuting there September 9. It's of particular interest to the company to test in Boston, as the city is rival Dunkin' Donuts' home turf. Clovers debuted yesterday in Seattle and will also appear in San Francisco on an unspecified date. But you don't have to...
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Starbucks has been hurting recently, but if anything can save this flagging chain, it could be an $11,000 Clover coffee machine. The stuff of dreams for hardcore java addicts, the Clover has the potential to steer the coffee giant back to great coffee basics and, for once, justify the high prices. As Wired reports, Starbucks discreetly purchased and installed a few Clovers at various Seattle and Boston stores in the summer of 2007, charging $3.05 for a cup of the fancy Clover brew. After thumbs-up came from testers, Starbucks purchased Clover's makers, the Coffee Equipment Company, and now won't sell any more machines to independent cafés. With plans to install 80 of them across the country this year, Starbucks has...
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Well, the Starbucks shareholder meeting has come and gone, and the two biggest pieces of news out of it are that the Seattle-based coffee giant is buying Clover Equipment, makers of the single-brew coffee machine coveted by beanheads, and that Starbucks is starting a social networking site (mystarbucksidea.com)—basically to pick your brain for further improvements....
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Did you read the article about high-end coffee brewers in the New York Times today? If so, you're probably wondering where you can find a coffee shop that uses one of the $11,000 Clover brewing machines mentioned. Easy enough. Just use the Find a Clover map on the company's website. Turns out there are quite a few more than the handful of locations the paper mentions. After the jump, a video of a Clover in action, if you're curious....
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