Clovers and Blossoms Seeding the Clouds with Your Coffee Preferences

Recent news stories about the impending delivery of the new Blossom One coffee brewer may have sparked a feeling of déjà vu for folks who follow coffee tech closely. The Blossom One is a high-end luxury brewer that costs about $11,000 and is connected to a cloud network where brewing specifics for particular coffees are stored. If you attended the SCAA convention in Boston this spring, you had a chance to taste the Blossom magic in action and talk to the company founders about the science behind brewing a perfect cup of coffee.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, you may be flashing back to another $11,000 coffee brewer that connects to a cloud network to retrieve brewing particulars for specialty coffee – the Clover.

Starbucks Is Back in Clover

The Clover was introduced by the Seattle Coffee Company back in 2008. Shortly after its introduction, the company was acquired by Starbucks. It made a big splash, then sort of faded into background noise. There are currently 500 Clovers in Starbucks stores around the country, and the coffee chain plans to double that number by next year.

Rare Blossoms for Optimized Coffee

While Starbucks is planning to bump up production and put more connected brewers out there, Blossom Coffee is aiming for a different market. The Blossom One is a limited edition. The company will make just 11 of the first edition espresso brewer. The first commercial Blossoms will make their debuts in Berkley and Nob Hill in the next couple of months. The SFoodie Blog reports that there will be news about a new edition Blossom in January.

A Blossom Is Not a Clover

There are distinct differences between the Clover and the Blossom, of course. The Clover brews drip coffee, while the Blossom brews press coffee. The Blossom allows more customization and user input than the Clover. You choose when to press the plunger on the Blossom, for example, and you can open it up to stir your coffee during the brew time.

On the other hand, there are definitely similarities in rationale. The cloud-connected brewers bring standardization to a new level. Once a coffee’s brewing specifics have been uploaded to the network, they can be automatically replicated by any connected brewer. The idea is for experts to create a set of “best practices” for each coffee and upload them to the cloud so that all the connected machines can replicate the exact same cup every single time.

Photos from blossomcoffee.com.