Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
"We don't make iced cappuccino," says Daniel Kim, a barista at Cafe Grumpy in New York. Since Starbucks came to dominate, this connoisseurs' coffee shop has fought a rearguard action against the march of skinny decaf vanilla lattes, writes Ravi Somaiya. And the arrival of a revolutionary coffee machine has led to queues stretching out the door.
The Clover, a small stainless-steel brewed coffee maker, costs almost BD4,500. It works using a piston and vacuum power, and allows coffee snobs to micro-manage the temperature, the brewing time, and the volume of water to produce one perfect cup at a time.
It's mostly hand-built by a team of engineers in Seattle and even connects to the internet to share brewing recipes. "You have to try it to believe it," says Kim. "It really extracts the flavour and makes it so much smoother. All the nuances come out."
Coffee fans have posted more pictures on Flickr (700-plus) than there are actual machines (about 250). Bloggers feverishly track which cafe the next one will turn up in, and compare notes on their first impressions. "This has ruined me for all other coffee," said one.
Demand is so high that when one Oregon-based coffee shop sold its Clover, it turned a healthy profit.
Which is no surprise when a single cup from the machine sells for more than BD6.
But now, because of Starbucks, there will be no more Clovers sold to independent cafes. Howard Schultz, the founder and CEO of the ailing coffee giant, was walking past Cafe Grumpy last year, noticed the queue and popped in for a taste. He was so blown away that Starbucks bought the Clover company. "Frankly, we just don't want anyone else to have it," a strategist told Wired magazine.
Kim isn't convinced it can deliver what Schultz first tasted. "The skill of the baristas is very important," he says, "and there's just not enough great coffee beans for the volume they sell."
Starbucks wouldn't comment, but did say that the machine is coming to its shops soon. Just don't ask for whipped cream if you try it.
