14 ms·

Ultrasonic Coffee

108 points by alkyon 2y ago

greenbit 2y ago
Wondering, is the resulting coffee thick because a certain amount of the grounds are pulverized enough to pass the filter? Would be interesting to centrifuge some and see if that's the case. Anyway, might not actually be an issue, given people's tolerance for odd coffee. (Don't think about elephants!)
alkyon 2y ago
I wonder if an avantgarde Penderecki coffee would taste sharper compared to let's say Mozart type:)
tromp 2y ago
> Will it be sold, marketed, drunk and understood under a new name, as Trujillo suggests: Sonicated coffee? Sonespresso? Ultrasonic espresso? I'd go with Sonicoffee ...
- MrTrvp 2y ago
  [flagged]
- tecleandor 2y ago
  By the sound of the ultrasonic cleaner my coworker used to have, I would name it Coffeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- nasmorn 2y ago
  It will obviously be Earspresso
  - amelius 2y ago
    Earspresso, what else?
    - andy_ppp 2y ago
      Buzzbrew
samuelec 2y ago
As an Italian, if it manages to break into our market, it means that it's good stuff. Yes, we are still very strict to our food related traditions and coffee is definitely one of them
- automatic6131 2y ago
  > coffee is definitely one of them Italians will say this, then put a moka pot on the stove for five minutes until it's boiled through, and serve you the blackest, most burnt tar imaginable - stuff that could qualify as road building material - and then turn around and insult American food tastes whilst they've skipped two meals in favor of cigarettes and the lowest quality wine. But that's okay, because they have some expensive olive oil in a ceramic bottle for the last two years. And you can't even accuse them of not having travelled enough, because half their young people are working across Europe, so they would know that there is better food out there in other countries - but they're doing that wine and cigarette diet so they remain ignorant and arrogant. They - you - are as bad as French people, but the rest of the world haven't discovered it yet.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    I spent some years in Italy and can't agree. Their cheapest wines poured straight from the tap are still great compared to just about everything else.
  - sjwod 2y ago
    This is a bit over the top and stereotypes/over-generalises... Italian food is genuinely good, but is now, in my opinion, also too beholden to traditions and tribalism (food must be prepared in this way and you are wrong otherwise), and I perceive a relative lack of openness to different cuisines compared to some other countries. Italian coffee is built on dark roasts of non-specialty (and often even Robusta) beans, which works well with milk-based drinks like cappuccinos but can also work well for espresso and moka brews too. Despite having a preference for lighter roasts I still enjoyed the coffee on my trip to Rome last year, and actually I would easily choose it over the big brand chains like Starbucks. What I find Italy is missing is the so-called 'third-wave', where light and medium roasts are preferred and higher quality (think specialty or single-origin, typically always Arabica) beans are typically used. I believe that this is partly due to the fact that espresso prices are regulated in many parts of Italy to be as low as €1-1.50 and so the business model just doesn't work unless the beans are cheap too.
gizajob 2y ago
[flagged]
gchadwick 2y ago
Until James Hoffman (https://www.youtube.com/@jameshoffmann/videos https://www.youtube.com/@jameshoffmann/videos) has done a video on it, it may as well not exist ;) Interesting idea, always nice to see new ways to brew coffee. I wonder how easy it is to replicate their process? The article isn't hugely clear. It talks about using a modified off the shelf domestic espresso machine but the picture at the top looks like a custom built device with potential complex machining involved to build. If it's the case you can buy an ultrasonic transducer and bodge it into an espresso machine lots of fun possibilities for coffee geeks (and to my point above someone like James Hoffman will give it a go and build up a bunch of interest in the technique) If it's the case you need a bunch of complex machining and significant technical skills (say those possessed by chemical engineers conducting cutting edge research...) then I imagine this will struggle to go anywhere.
- ascorbic 2y ago
  The article says they working to commercialise it. That will presumably involve selling a machine.
  - c0nsumer 2y ago
    If they sell a reasonably priced machine (say, under US$400) which is easy to clean, doesn't use any sort of pod/cup, doesn't have any subscription malarkey, and is reasonably sized, I'll give it a very serious look. The whole idea sounds like it could be really simple once implemented, and in a world of super complicated coffee brewers with small little crevices that are hard to clean, it'd be very welcome.
    - prpl 2y ago
      That’s comically cheap. The gaggia classic, arguably king of the entry level espresso, is that same price. They could release it at $900 (MSRP of Rancilio Silvia) and easily sell a million if it’s worth it. I’d guess they could easily start at $1200-1500 and drop the price from there after the first couple of production runs.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Good. Great to learn that hot water/steam can be substituted by ultrasound in some particularly important general-use processes. Making note of this, it looks like another building block on the quest to build the real-world equivalent of Star Trek's food replicator.
spython 2y ago
I'll repeat my comment from the previous discussion, as ultrasound can be used to extract many things quickly: Alternatively you could use a (quite affordable) ultrasonic machine designed for gentle cleaning of jewelry, dentures, glasses.. I've used one to extract fragrance from biological material for an artistic project[0], and it worked really well. Instead of having to wait for a few weeks for a tincture to finish, you put the same tincture (alcohol and material you want to extract fragrance from) into a plastic bag for just 15 minutes. Sure, it smells not quite the same, but the speed is often worth it. I've even heard about some guy trying to turn vodka into whiskey with an ultrasonic machine and wood chips. There are quite a few ultrasonic machines on the market. I've tried EMAG and multiple Chinese no-name machines that are just as powerful but cheaper. Sadly the no-name machines are quite a bit louder - you can't stay in the same room while it's running basically. Still, they all work well for this kind of fast and dirty extraction. [0] https://rybakov.com/blog/smelling_cz/ https://rybakov.com/blog/smelling_cz/ (second half of the page)
- Modified3019 2y ago
  A long while back, I looked into how viable ultrasonic acceleration of the “aging” of Dit Da Jow (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dit_da_jow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dit_da_jow) would be and had come across a paper looking into it the same. If I remember correctly, while ultrasonic treatment did a decent job of quickly extracting the various chemicals from their carriers, there were some caveats. The ratio of chemicals extracted could differ from normal, and it only did a partial job of accelerating the formation of very complex secondary compounds that form when the whole mix is properly aged. So the difference in smell you found could be some chemicals being preferentially released over others, and/or the lack the secondary chemicals.
  - spython 2y ago
    Indeed, it is after all more of a mechanical extraction than a chemical one. I remember seeing tiny bits of grass floating in the tincture after extracting the scent of fresh grass - the cavitation bubbles practically shattered the cell structure of the plant, and a dusty green soup was floating around the blades of grass.
Arch-TK 2y ago
>But unlike an espresso, it’s not bitter or harsh. Speak for yourselves, the espresso I make is neither inherently bitter or harsh. It depends entirely on the recipe.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  If you don't mind sharing, what's your recipe / trick?
  - bigfudge 2y ago
    In my experience, mostly just buying nice beans and not doing anything stupid with them. The hangover from Italian style coffee is quite strong and means we get a lot of over-roasted beans (or at least, cheap beans over-roasted to disguise the quality. This style was a necessity when Italians imported low grade beans from their own colonies in the 19th and early 20thC, but if buying single origin beans lighter roasts are (imo) just much more interesting and less bitter/harsh.
  - Arch-TK 2y ago
    It's not really a trick, you need good quality coffee (lighter roasts are going to inherently end up less bitter and more acidic but realistically you can normally get something balanced from any roast level), a high quality grinder (too much grind inconsistency will make it difficult to get a reliable extraction, one time you might get a coffee that tastes good and the next it takes half the time to extract and tastes awful as a result), a good machine which doesn't go above 9 bars of pressure, and a lot of patience/experience. As a general rule, the lighter you go the harder it is to extract the coffee. The more expensive the equipment will need to be. To make good espresso from light roasts you can benefit from a machine which can handle flow profiling as the puck is so unstable at lower roasts that consistency becomes very difficult. So you pick a medium roast, a good quality grinder (although even in the expensive range, different types and subtypes of burr will produce different results) and a quality machine which can hold a stable temperature. Next, it's important to keep it all consistent, weigh the coffee, weigh the output. Things like WDT[0] can help get an even distribution of coffee in the portafilter, although recently people have started looking at shaking the coffee grounds as a better option, although there's some limited research on this. To go the extra mile, RDT[1] can help increase grind consistency, and so can freezing the coffee beans (although usually you want to single dose the coffee to avoid condensation on your frozen beans slowly causing the moisture content to increase). I also use paper filters below and above the puck, as well as a mesh filter on top of the paper filter, this helps distribute water, prevent clogging, and improve reliability (it's honestly quite a surprisingly noticeable difference). Now for dialling in: You pull a shot, you taste it, as a general rule of thumb if it tastes empty and sour you should pull a longer shot (higher output weight), if it tastes bitter and/or salty then you should pull a shorter shot (lower output weight). Once your flavors are balanced you can adjust the grind to increase or reduce the overall concentration to your taste. For medium roast I normally aim for 1:2.5 ratio (15g of ground coffee in, 37.5g of liquid coffee out) and adjust from there. The timing is a complex topic which depends highly on what you're trying to do, turbo shots naturally run very fast, blooming shots naturally run very long. You should try to get the machine to run between 20 and 35 seconds but if it tastes better if you go longer/shorter then don't blindly stick to this. It's difficult to get good espresso reliably, and especially so when you are doing it at home and don't have a day's worth of customers to offset the cost of a wasted few shots. But it's possible. You also have to start over every time you get new coffee beans. For reference, my setup is a Gaggia classic modded with flow profiling (gagguino mod) with a niche zero conical burr grinder. I live far enough away from London that Brita filtering the water produces good quality results, but some people may want to distill and re-mineralise water using a recipe for maximum consistency. [0]: https://www.baristahustle.com/weiss-distribution-technique/ https://www.baristahustle.com/weiss-distribution-technique/ [1]: https://www.beanground.com/ross-droplet-technique/ https://www.beanground.com/ross-droplet-technique/
neogodless 2y ago
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40284823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40284823 Cold brew coffee in 3 minutes using acoustic cavitation (unsw.edu.au) 2024-05-07 (351 comments)
bitdivision 2y ago
I just tried this with a mug of coffee in an ultrasonic cleaner. Left it running for about 5 minutes with room temp water and ground coffee in the mug. Compared afterwards to a mug left outside the ultrasonic cleaner. There was definitely more extraction in the ultrasonic cleaner, though the coffee was still fairly weak. Likely needs more time given that they are using a custom horn etc.
- ano-ther 2y ago
  Thanks for the test. They also use 100W of ultrasonic power: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1350417724001330 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135041772... and a cursory search says this is the domain of more expensive ultrasonic cleaners (> 100$).
  - bitdivision 2y ago
    True, the one I have was a China special, but does say 60W.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    Supposedly ultrasonic cleaners use 15-400 khz, and DML audio exciter drivers go to 17-20 khz, so you could theoretically grab a few of those for under $100 and have at it with a sine generator.
    - bitdivision 2y ago
      The transducers are fairly cheap from China [0]. I've thought about making a high powered bath before but never pulled the trigger. 0: https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-ultrasound-transducer.html?spm=a2g0o.home.search.0 https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-ultrasound-transducer...
      - moffkalast 2y ago
        Ah right, yeah those would be perfect.
vessenes 2y ago
I would buy this. Sell me one please. There's a little history of trying to get a new coffee method named: Clover comes to mind, a vertical extraction, high pressure, fine-filter plunge method that's like a powered Aeropress. The founder made it to be a kind of new price point offering between drip and espresso drinks. Starbucks ultimately bought Clover, and seems mostly to have shut it down, which is too bad - it was a nice product for third wave coffee shops to offer, and it's only rolled out now at high end Starbucks. It is worth the wait, although maybe not the cost - it seems to exist to sell $10 "Blue Mountain" coffee at Starbucks now. Anyway, I would guess this would sell more as an enthusiast home product than something that can fit in to existing coffee shops; the Clover story I think is that something new can be appealing, but it's probably not worth the counter space at indies; unless it can replace the espresso machine completely, e.g. as a mode in your existing espresso machine, it's not going to go into what is usually very crowded production space.
- sithadmin 2y ago
  >Starbucks ultimately bought Clover, and seems mostly to have shut it down They more or less killed the original model, but they're pushing to deploy the new 'Vertica' model so that drip coffee is brewed on-demand rather than by batch. Ostensibly to reduce waste. The output from Vertica machines is definitely subpar compared to the original, however.
  - vessenes 2y ago
    Interesting! I note that the single illustration on the Vertica page shows a narrower machine. It makes sense they decided the thing to do is replace the drip machine with a higher-value product machine, and leave espresso alone.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lazyeye 2y ago
https://reddit.com/r/decaf https://reddit.com/r/decaf

108 points by alkyon 2y ago

Wondering, is the resulting coffee thick because a certain amount of the grounds are pulverized enough to pass the filter? Would be interesting to centrifuge some and see if that's the case. Anyway, might not actually be an issue, given people's tolerance for odd coffee. (Don't think about elephants!)

alkyon 2y ago

I wonder if an avantgarde Penderecki coffee would taste sharper compared to let's say Mozart type:)

tromp 2y ago

> Will it be sold, marketed, drunk and understood under a new name, as Trujillo suggests: Sonicated coffee? Sonespresso? Ultrasonic espresso? I'd go with Sonicoffee ...

MrTrvp 2y ago
[flagged]
tecleandor 2y ago
By the sound of the ultrasonic cleaner my coworker used to have, I would name it Coffeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
nasmorn 2y ago
It will obviously be Earspresso
- amelius 2y ago
  Earspresso, what else?
  - andy_ppp 2y ago
    Buzzbrew

samuelec 2y ago

As an Italian, if it manages to break into our market, it means that it's good stuff. Yes, we are still very strict to our food related traditions and coffee is definitely one of them

automatic6131 2y ago
> coffee is definitely one of them Italians will say this, then put a moka pot on the stove for five minutes until it's boiled through, and serve you the blackest, most burnt tar imaginable - stuff that could qualify as road building material - and then turn around and insult American food tastes whilst they've skipped two meals in favor of cigarettes and the lowest quality wine. But that's okay, because they have some expensive olive oil in a ceramic bottle for the last two years. And you can't even accuse them of not having travelled enough, because half their young people are working across Europe, so they would know that there is better food out there in other countries - but they're doing that wine and cigarette diet so they remain ignorant and arrogant. They - you - are as bad as French people, but the rest of the world haven't discovered it yet.
- Tade0 2y ago
  I spent some years in Italy and can't agree. Their cheapest wines poured straight from the tap are still great compared to just about everything else.
- sjwod 2y ago
  This is a bit over the top and stereotypes/over-generalises... Italian food is genuinely good, but is now, in my opinion, also too beholden to traditions and tribalism (food must be prepared in this way and you are wrong otherwise), and I perceive a relative lack of openness to different cuisines compared to some other countries. Italian coffee is built on dark roasts of non-specialty (and often even Robusta) beans, which works well with milk-based drinks like cappuccinos but can also work well for espresso and moka brews too. Despite having a preference for lighter roasts I still enjoyed the coffee on my trip to Rome last year, and actually I would easily choose it over the big brand chains like Starbucks. What I find Italy is missing is the so-called 'third-wave', where light and medium roasts are preferred and higher quality (think specialty or single-origin, typically always Arabica) beans are typically used. I believe that this is partly due to the fact that espresso prices are regulated in many parts of Italy to be as low as €1-1.50 and so the business model just doesn't work unless the beans are cheap too.

gizajob 2y ago

[flagged]

gchadwick 2y ago

Until James Hoffman (https://www.youtube.com/@jameshoffmann/videos https://www.youtube.com/@jameshoffmann/videos) has done a video on it, it may as well not exist ;) Interesting idea, always nice to see new ways to brew coffee. I wonder how easy it is to replicate their process? The article isn't hugely clear. It talks about using a modified off the shelf domestic espresso machine but the picture at the top looks like a custom built device with potential complex machining involved to build. If it's the case you can buy an ultrasonic transducer and bodge it into an espresso machine lots of fun possibilities for coffee geeks (and to my point above someone like James Hoffman will give it a go and build up a bunch of interest in the technique) If it's the case you need a bunch of complex machining and significant technical skills (say those possessed by chemical engineers conducting cutting edge research...) then I imagine this will struggle to go anywhere.

ascorbic 2y ago
The article says they working to commercialise it. That will presumably involve selling a machine.
- c0nsumer 2y ago
  If they sell a reasonably priced machine (say, under US$400) which is easy to clean, doesn't use any sort of pod/cup, doesn't have any subscription malarkey, and is reasonably sized, I'll give it a very serious look. The whole idea sounds like it could be really simple once implemented, and in a world of super complicated coffee brewers with small little crevices that are hard to clean, it'd be very welcome.
  - prpl 2y ago
    That’s comically cheap. The gaggia classic, arguably king of the entry level espresso, is that same price. They could release it at $900 (MSRP of Rancilio Silvia) and easily sell a million if it’s worth it. I’d guess they could easily start at $1200-1500 and drop the price from there after the first couple of production runs.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Good. Great to learn that hot water/steam can be substituted by ultrasound in some particularly important general-use processes. Making note of this, it looks like another building block on the quest to build the real-world equivalent of Star Trek's food replicator.

spython 2y ago

I'll repeat my comment from the previous discussion, as ultrasound can be used to extract many things quickly: Alternatively you could use a (quite affordable) ultrasonic machine designed for gentle cleaning of jewelry, dentures, glasses.. I've used one to extract fragrance from biological material for an artistic project[0], and it worked really well. Instead of having to wait for a few weeks for a tincture to finish, you put the same tincture (alcohol and material you want to extract fragrance from) into a plastic bag for just 15 minutes. Sure, it smells not quite the same, but the speed is often worth it. I've even heard about some guy trying to turn vodka into whiskey with an ultrasonic machine and wood chips. There are quite a few ultrasonic machines on the market. I've tried EMAG and multiple Chinese no-name machines that are just as powerful but cheaper. Sadly the no-name machines are quite a bit louder - you can't stay in the same room while it's running basically. Still, they all work well for this kind of fast and dirty extraction. [0] https://rybakov.com/blog/smelling_cz/ https://rybakov.com/blog/smelling_cz/ (second half of the page)

Modified3019 2y ago
A long while back, I looked into how viable ultrasonic acceleration of the “aging” of Dit Da Jow (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dit_da_jow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dit_da_jow) would be and had come across a paper looking into it the same. If I remember correctly, while ultrasonic treatment did a decent job of quickly extracting the various chemicals from their carriers, there were some caveats. The ratio of chemicals extracted could differ from normal, and it only did a partial job of accelerating the formation of very complex secondary compounds that form when the whole mix is properly aged. So the difference in smell you found could be some chemicals being preferentially released over others, and/or the lack the secondary chemicals.
- spython 2y ago
  Indeed, it is after all more of a mechanical extraction than a chemical one. I remember seeing tiny bits of grass floating in the tincture after extracting the scent of fresh grass - the cavitation bubbles practically shattered the cell structure of the plant, and a dusty green soup was floating around the blades of grass.

Arch-TK 2y ago

>But unlike an espresso, it’s not bitter or harsh. Speak for yourselves, the espresso I make is neither inherently bitter or harsh. It depends entirely on the recipe.

CoastalCoder 2y ago
If you don't mind sharing, what's your recipe / trick?
- bigfudge 2y ago
  In my experience, mostly just buying nice beans and not doing anything stupid with them. The hangover from Italian style coffee is quite strong and means we get a lot of over-roasted beans (or at least, cheap beans over-roasted to disguise the quality. This style was a necessity when Italians imported low grade beans from their own colonies in the 19th and early 20thC, but if buying single origin beans lighter roasts are (imo) just much more interesting and less bitter/harsh.
- Arch-TK 2y ago
  It's not really a trick, you need good quality coffee (lighter roasts are going to inherently end up less bitter and more acidic but realistically you can normally get something balanced from any roast level), a high quality grinder (too much grind inconsistency will make it difficult to get a reliable extraction, one time you might get a coffee that tastes good and the next it takes half the time to extract and tastes awful as a result), a good machine which doesn't go above 9 bars of pressure, and a lot of patience/experience. As a general rule, the lighter you go the harder it is to extract the coffee. The more expensive the equipment will need to be. To make good espresso from light roasts you can benefit from a machine which can handle flow profiling as the puck is so unstable at lower roasts that consistency becomes very difficult. So you pick a medium roast, a good quality grinder (although even in the expensive range, different types and subtypes of burr will produce different results) and a quality machine which can hold a stable temperature. Next, it's important to keep it all consistent, weigh the coffee, weigh the output. Things like WDT[0] can help get an even distribution of coffee in the portafilter, although recently people have started looking at shaking the coffee grounds as a better option, although there's some limited research on this. To go the extra mile, RDT[1] can help increase grind consistency, and so can freezing the coffee beans (although usually you want to single dose the coffee to avoid condensation on your frozen beans slowly causing the moisture content to increase). I also use paper filters below and above the puck, as well as a mesh filter on top of the paper filter, this helps distribute water, prevent clogging, and improve reliability (it's honestly quite a surprisingly noticeable difference). Now for dialling in: You pull a shot, you taste it, as a general rule of thumb if it tastes empty and sour you should pull a longer shot (higher output weight), if it tastes bitter and/or salty then you should pull a shorter shot (lower output weight). Once your flavors are balanced you can adjust the grind to increase or reduce the overall concentration to your taste. For medium roast I normally aim for 1:2.5 ratio (15g of ground coffee in, 37.5g of liquid coffee out) and adjust from there. The timing is a complex topic which depends highly on what you're trying to do, turbo shots naturally run very fast, blooming shots naturally run very long. You should try to get the machine to run between 20 and 35 seconds but if it tastes better if you go longer/shorter then don't blindly stick to this. It's difficult to get good espresso reliably, and especially so when you are doing it at home and don't have a day's worth of customers to offset the cost of a wasted few shots. But it's possible. You also have to start over every time you get new coffee beans. For reference, my setup is a Gaggia classic modded with flow profiling (gagguino mod) with a niche zero conical burr grinder. I live far enough away from London that Brita filtering the water produces good quality results, but some people may want to distill and re-mineralise water using a recipe for maximum consistency. [0]: https://www.baristahustle.com/weiss-distribution-technique/ https://www.baristahustle.com/weiss-distribution-technique/ [1]: https://www.beanground.com/ross-droplet-technique/ https://www.beanground.com/ross-droplet-technique/

neogodless 2y ago

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40284823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40284823 Cold brew coffee in 3 minutes using acoustic cavitation (unsw.edu.au) 2024-05-07 (351 comments)

bitdivision 2y ago

I just tried this with a mug of coffee in an ultrasonic cleaner. Left it running for about 5 minutes with room temp water and ground coffee in the mug. Compared afterwards to a mug left outside the ultrasonic cleaner. There was definitely more extraction in the ultrasonic cleaner, though the coffee was still fairly weak. Likely needs more time given that they are using a custom horn etc.

ano-ther 2y ago
Thanks for the test. They also use 100W of ultrasonic power: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1350417724001330 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135041772... and a cursory search says this is the domain of more expensive ultrasonic cleaners (> 100$).
- bitdivision 2y ago
  True, the one I have was a China special, but does say 60W.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Supposedly ultrasonic cleaners use 15-400 khz, and DML audio exciter drivers go to 17-20 khz, so you could theoretically grab a few of those for under $100 and have at it with a sine generator.
  - bitdivision 2y ago
    The transducers are fairly cheap from China [0]. I've thought about making a high powered bath before but never pulled the trigger. 0: https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-ultrasound-transducer.html?spm=a2g0o.home.search.0 https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-ultrasound-transducer...
    - moffkalast 2y ago
      Ah right, yeah those would be perfect.

vessenes 2y ago

I would buy this. Sell me one please. There's a little history of trying to get a new coffee method named: Clover comes to mind, a vertical extraction, high pressure, fine-filter plunge method that's like a powered Aeropress. The founder made it to be a kind of new price point offering between drip and espresso drinks. Starbucks ultimately bought Clover, and seems mostly to have shut it down, which is too bad - it was a nice product for third wave coffee shops to offer, and it's only rolled out now at high end Starbucks. It is worth the wait, although maybe not the cost - it seems to exist to sell $10 "Blue Mountain" coffee at Starbucks now. Anyway, I would guess this would sell more as an enthusiast home product than something that can fit in to existing coffee shops; the Clover story I think is that something new can be appealing, but it's probably not worth the counter space at indies; unless it can replace the espresso machine completely, e.g. as a mode in your existing espresso machine, it's not going to go into what is usually very crowded production space.

sithadmin 2y ago
>Starbucks ultimately bought Clover, and seems mostly to have shut it down They more or less killed the original model, but they're pushing to deploy the new 'Vertica' model so that drip coffee is brewed on-demand rather than by batch. Ostensibly to reduce waste. The output from Vertica machines is definitely subpar compared to the original, however.
- vessenes 2y ago
  Interesting! I note that the single illustration on the Vertica page shows a narrower machine. It makes sense they decided the thing to do is replace the drip machine with a higher-value product machine, and leave espresso alone.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lazyeye 2y ago

https://reddit.com/r/decaf https://reddit.com/r/decaf