The Clover: Coffee Equipment

Glen: Welcome to LeGourmet TV, today we’re in Seattle at the Clover Coffee Company and we’re going to take a look at this machine which I find very intriguing. David Latourell: Well. Hi, I'm David Latourell and I am one of the employees here at Coffee Equipment Company. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: We make the Clover, and so the machine itself is a single cup brewer. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: Semi-commercial environment and what that means I'm sure a lot of folks out there so when they go the coffee shop they think about coffee in terms of brewed coffee as “drip”. “Give me a cup of drip” but I want someone to deliver coffee now. They don’t think about coffee in terms of interesting flavor profiles in different season or in different season varietal. And so in lot of their world right now people just don’t conceive a brewed as a culinary a experience. Glen: It’s coffee. David Latourell: It’s coffee, and don’t get all fancy about it it’s just coffee. Glen: We’ll going to mix sugar in, we’ll going to mix milk in, we’re going to— David Latourell: Right, and so you know there’s always a place for things like that. Glen: Sure. David Latourell: Absolutely, but what are machine is design to do is to take coffee out of that world which is being really a commodity world it’s commodified where it’s on a big market and people get paid you know, and the people who brew the coffee get paid of you know a very distinct price which is quite low. Glen: Yes. David Latourell: What a lot of roasters have been doing lately is they’ve been finding this really exquisite coffees and bring them into the consuming countries, to us and offering them for sale, but they’re really very, very able to offer them in a retail environments, so that’s where this machine is born. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: Was roasters looking for a way to get their costumers an opportunity in their shop to try their coffees. There really, really wonderful coffees that they often bringing in, and that’s what the machine does. So basically what happens is that if you were a customer coming in to our shop I would have a list of coffees, I have an array of coffees maybe five maybe seven coffees and it probably be anything from a blend one of my traditional blends that I would have. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: Up to a single origin varietal that had won a competition like the Cup of Excellence for example. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: Now what I'm doing is I'm grinding one cup worth of coffee at a time, and a lot of people know this that grinding your coffee fresh is really the very best way to experience coffee. You loosen enormous amount of the flavor compounds when you grind it to oxidization. Glen: Yes. David Latourell: So really this is super important grind fresh. Here I'm grinding fresh. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to dial my machine to the amount of coffee that I want to brew. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: And so I can go from 6 to 16 ounces. I can also change the amount of time that it’s going to steep. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: So now it’s one of these variables is key to producing a great cup of coffee, and you can adjust each of the variables independently with our machine you can adjust the mount of coffee you use of course. You can adjust the size of the grinds. You can also adjust the water, the time, the temperature each one of these things will have a huge impact on the cup. Glen: Have you had a chart? David Latourell: Absolutely, and so what we do is we work with folks who are putting our machine into place. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: To develop recipes for their coffees. Of course we really want people to find their own flavor profiles. What we’ve done is we’ve developed a sort of a range where we start and we’re starting in that range because we really want people to experience this you know, the best quality cup but we really do it in the fast paced environment. Coffee shops of course are you know place where people want to get their coffee, and so the traditional brewing methods that have been employed to get really high quality cups usually take a minimum of four to five minutes in production. Glen: Okay. David Latourell: What we’re doing is we’re trying to get that cup to the consumer in under a minute.