Starbucks announced the other day that it has bought the Coffee Equipment Company, makers of the much-ballyhooed Clover brewing machine, for an undisclosed sum. Apparently Starbucks intends to put Clovers in all but the smallest stores, as part of Howard Schultz’s overall push to increase quality in his stores and slow the recent but increasing decline in Big Green’s growth.

Considering that Clover brewers sell at well over $8000 each, this is no small feat. The Clover made waves when it debuted a couple of years ago, claiming to have perfected the four variables of coffee-brewing: time, temperature, grind, and extraction ratio. It was the product of several years of research and development by Zander Nosler and was practically an overnight success–at the moment there are only 200-300 Clovers operating in retail stores around the world, but at that $8-10k a pop, that’s a serious chunk of change.

The Clover has many devoted fans, but I must admit that while I admire Coffee Equipment Company’s engineering savvy I never really bought into the device. Most of its programmable features are present in a Fetco Extractor at a quarter of the price, thought the Extractor doesn’t work on a per-cup basis. It’s meant to do per-cup servings consistently at high volumes, but if your volume’s that high, why not just brew a whole airpot? And if your volume’s low enough for a cup at a time, why not just use a French press and a temp-adjustable tabletop water boiler? I’ve had great coffee out of a Clover, but nothing better than what I’ve had, say, from a Bodum French press using a correctly-measured amount of grounds.

Now, though, the point may well be academic. Because Schultz is in effect literally taking the Clover off the market, since it will now only be used to brew Starbucks’ own coffee–which seems like just pointless theater, since the coffee is roasted so poorly that no $8,000 brewer is going to fix it. As Greg Sherwin over at TheShot coffee blog very aptly put it: “Who buys a $30,000 sound system to listen to AM talk radio?”

In a nod to the classic style of apprenticeship from ye olden days, the Lincoln, Nebraska, coffeeshop Cultiva Coffee is offering a literal apprenticeship program for baristas, roasters, and even managers.

By “classic” I mean that applicants would travel to Lincoln and stay in the owners’ home, working at the shop 30 hours a week in exchange for training in one of a number of offered programs: Barista Training, Roaster Training, and Small Business Management. Programs last four weeks each, or you can stay for three months and take all three. Here’s a few details on the offered programs as listed on Cultiva’s website:

1. Barista Training (4 weeks)
Latte art, speed training, coffee agronomy and history, and insight on training for regional barista competitions. By the time your training is complete, you will know the basics and be able to demonstrate barista skills that are as seen in regional and national barista SCAA competitions. Jon Ferguson has served as both a NWRBC Sensory Judge and MRBC Technical Judge. Ferguson initially received barista training as an employee at Zoka Coffee Company in Seattle, Washington in 2005. He started Cultiva Coffee Roasting Company in the Fall of 2006, and has been roasting and pouring rosettas ever since!

2. Roasting (4-8 weeks)
We won’t just flip a switch and burn some coffee. I’ll go into depth about buying green coffees from importers, how to get your business certified organic and fair trade. We’ll track our flow of inventory, measure weight loss, discuss “degrees of roast” and how to define them for yourself, how to package, promote, and sell roasted coffees to cafés, bakeries, grocery stores, etc. We will learn how to roast with a few different stylistic approaches, maintain roast logs, and will gain experience on properly maintaining and cleaning a Diedrich IR-12 roaster.

3. Small business management (4 weeks)
I’ll be more transparent with my books than one may expect. I’ll show you our filing cabinet, how I keep them, the problems I’ve had in the past and present and how I fixed it. I’ll basically give you Cultiva’s paperwork ‘tour’ through our filings, talk about city codes, permits, building-out space, loan documents, etc.

It sounds like a fascinating opportunity, and I hope anyone who takes up Ferguson’s offer blogs about the experience. Particularly because the in-shop roasting machine is Espresso Vivace‘s old Deidrich IR-12; I live around the corner from Vivace here in Seattle and can vouch for the fact that that machine turns out some of the best coffee possible, making it a great machine to learn on. I can’t refrain from mentioning, however, that my only reservation–besides the obvious disadvantages of spending up to three months away from home with no income, but that’s surmountable–is that Ferguson doesn’t seem to have a lot of experience as a roaster. If I understand his website correctly, then he’s been a barista for less than three years and a roaster for barely one. He clearly has at least some level of real expertise, having served as a judge in two of the official regional barista championships, and he’s got a hell of a machine, so even without the resume it should be worth it to consider the program if you’re new to the coffee industry and serious about learning as much as you can in a short amount of time.

The most recent post on That Other Coffee Blog about roasting with an audience got me thinking about my own experiences roasting coffee in a public (or semi-public) environment. At my last shop our roasting room was actually set apart from the retail floor; we used to have our 12k Samiac sitting on the retail floor, but roasters make a lot of noise, and we discovered that we were annoying the customers with the smoke and noise as much as we had trouble focusing with the goings-on of a busy shop all around us. Perhaps more importantly, as our wholesale business grew we started running out of room for the green coffee bags.

So we moved roasting operations to a room in the back, into the conference room we used to rent out. Customers would still frequently wander back to the roasting room and ask what we were doing. Invariably they would ask if I was “grinding beans” in the roasting machine. I’m not sure why grinding is always the first conclusion people jump to–I don’t know of any food production industry that requires a 1350lb, burning cast-iron monstrosity to grind anything–but there you are.

The pros of roasting for an audience are pretty clear…you become an ambassador for your coffee knowledge, you help educate customers about the finer points of specialty coffee and the time and effort it takes to produce, and you build a reputation as a coffee pro. The disadvantages are a little less obvious, but they’re definitely worth considering. Frequently stopping to answer questions can take your attention away from the beans, and I’d be lying if I said that it never happened that I burned a batch because I was explaining to a customer all the ways a roaster prevents burning a batch. Also, the more busy the wholesale side of things gets, the more pressed for time you are on a daily basis. I did occasionally have to politely ask interested customers to come back another time as I was busily packaging hundreds of pounds of coffee for a wholesale shipment.

Now I’m in a somewhat ideal situation: my roasting room and cupping lab is in the basement of our retail space. On busy days where focus is important, I can kind of shut myself in and work uninterrupted. But we also have a street-facing garage door that we can open, so there’s plenty of opportunity to hold roasting demonstrations and cupping sessions. In short, I can be as public as I like, which is great. I like roasting for an audience, but I also tend to get “zoned into the beans” and once I get into that flow I like being able to run with it.