Very flash coffee machine in work. It's about $11k of shiny latest-thing-in-caffeine-consumption and it's just sitting all forlorn in one of the random canteens in Mountain View. It apparently can make awesome coffee and I certainly found that it was possible to get very different flavours from the same beans.
The problem is, I think, that it needs someone more expert than me to really do it justice. For one thing, whoever had set it up initially had the brew time set way too high (it's sort of like a vacuum-pump version of a cafetiére) so I was getting only muddy rubbish. I had a lot of trouble finding the right value in a reasonable amount of time. That's just one of several usefully adjustable parameters (the other big one being brew temperature). Presumably one can just download suggestions for common beans (the initial values I tried were ones I remembered from a review of the machine).
What was odd was that I had planned to make a special trip up to SF to find a cafe with one on this trip over and yet I just stumbled onto this in the American Kitchen cafe near my building. It actually put me off bothering to find one in a cafe which I regret now as they would probably have done a better job with it.
Now that Starbucks have bought the manufacturer there are rumours that we'll see them in every mermaid store but it's conceivable that, despite their protestations to the contrary, they bought it to bury it.
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