Lucky Clover with the CoffeeMeister

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Well, what do you know? Clovers really are lucky.

Of course, I'm not talking about the four-leaf kind, though that type's pretty rare, too. No, I mean the Clover coffee maker, a high-tech gadget that dropped jaws all over bean circles a few years ago, with its deeply sophisticated, digital one-cup-at-a-time brewing (not to mention the $11K price tag).

At first, the machines were the pride of the serious coffee lover, with independent cafés snapping them up as a way of showcasing artisanal coffees one by one, instead of losing them to the murky depths of an insulated thermos. But when Starbucks bought the Clover technology last year, the funky-looking little metal boxes were suddenly less and less available to your average café owner, becoming proprietary to the green mermaid.

So why is this lucky? Because it started a revolution. Or, more accurately, a renaissance. Read more about getting lucky with cup-at-a-time coffee after the jump.

One cup at a time. Photo: Erin Meister.

One-cup brewing has been around for ages (in 1908, a German housewife named Melitta invented the first coffee filter), but has been largely left at home, where its practicality seems more obvious than in a busy café. But that hurdle has successfully been jumped: People have been buzzing about the Clover in a retail environment, with its ability to take Joe Consumer out of the coffee-as-fast-food mentality and bring him into the world of the handcrafted cup.

Suddenly, we were hearing, "Would you mind waiting just a moment, sir, while I prepare your coffee fresh to order?" instead of, "How many sugars would you like in that?" In many cases, we started paying upwards of $2, $3, even $5 for a single cup of coffee brewed especially for us. Yowza!

Since the Clover's slow retreat from general circulation (though there are plenty of non-Starbucks entities that still use them, and use them well), many coffee shops have turned to the single-cup brewing methods I've often discussed here on Slashfood and elsewhere: Chemex brewers, porcelain coffee cones, siphon pots and even the new so-called Clever coffee dripper, have ditched the kitchen in search of heavier foot traffic.

Because the coffees best brewed using manual or small-batch techniques tend to be top-shelf, the cup might cost more than we're used to in this grab-and-go world. They also take a bit longer, anywhere from just about one minute to perhaps as many as five or six -- though watching the process can be mesmerizing enough to help make the wait less tedious.

Can we learn to slow down and really enjoy our coffee? And is by-the-cup brewing the way to do it? Give us your opinion in the comments.