stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

The Clover Has Landed

Nov 28, 2007 coffee, farming

I emailed Kaldi’s after my post yesterday asking about their Clover coffee machine, and what I found out, is that after a year of occasionally asking them when it would show up in a store, at long last, it’s in the new Clayton location which opened today.

And because almost nobody who reads this will have any idea what the hell I’m talking about…

Their take…

The Clover is a single serving coffee machine developed by The Coffee Equipment Company in Seattle which allows you to “brew each cup to order according to each coffee’s unique characteristics.”

My short take…

In short it’s a customizable single serving drip coffee maker that brews in approximately one minute. I’ve only seen one in person once at The Roasterie in Kansas City and unfortunately, I didn’t see it until being well caffeinated.

Who cares?

The major benefit to coffee shops is the reduction of wasted drip coffee going down the drain.

The benefit to you, the coffee consumer, is that it gives shops the ability to brew higher quality drip coffees than would traditionally be served due to cost. It also gives them the ability to brew these coffees under each origins optimal conditions while also maximizing freshness as it is brewed literally while you wait.

My rambling take…

I first heard of the Clover on coffee blog Tonx.org early last year. Then, after our whirlwind trip to NYC in which I hit a handful of notable shops, Tonx made another post about coffee shops in NYC in which they talked about Cafe Grumpy having two clovers in their Chelsea location. Somehow we missed Grumpy, but my interest was definitely piqued as we’d been to several of the shops mentioned (Ninth Street Espresso…oh yeah!). It was around this time I spotted Kaldi’s name on the Clover website and an email turned up that they did in fact have one at their roasting facility with plans to move it to the Demun store someday.

And all this ties in nicely to Chance’s comment to my previous post about Kaldi’s beginning to offer Cup of Excellence coffees. To my knowledge Kaldi’s will be the first roaster in the area to offer COE coffees, and I hope this plays out well for them as it’s very exciting local coffee news.

Using Intelligentsia as the example, some of the COE coffees they roast regularly go for $50 per pound or more. While that might seem like a lot, when you consider the 30-40 cups of coffee you get per pound, it’s pretty much on par with America’s favorite caffeinated beverage: Coca-Cola.

And what is Cup of Excellence?

Although it’s a massive oversimplification I always refer to Cup of Excellence as a sort of “conservative implementation of fair trade.”

The goal of Fair Trade is to set a fair price floor for growers without much regard to quality.

With Cup of Excellence, however, a competition is held in each growing country where a single farmer represents himself only by entering his crop for a given year. Coffee buyers from all over the world will descend upon the nation in question and do a tasting of the roasted beans in what is known as cupping. Through this cupping they will vote on their favorite coffees and places will be awarded.

This offers farmers the immediate prestige of being singled out in the coffee community as exceptional growers, and more importantly, after judging, an auction takes place in which quality is awarded financially as record breaking prices are paid to those farmers who rank high in the competition.

Certainly that’s a whittled down version of the happenings at a Cup of Excellence competition, but there’s a vast  amount of information about the events online if you were interested in reading more.

Here for instance is Sweet Maria’s posting about the 2006 Nicaruagua COE. Tom’s postings are always great because he’s not shy about camera usage and has an amazing pallet.

I can’t wait to try the Clover and the COE.

Tags: Clover, Cup of Excellence, Kaldi's Coffee