Posts by kevinhaugen

Clive is now extending customer support and classes to your home! We are providing at-home support via Skype or FaceTime to help set up your espresso machine, out of the box. Having issues figuring out how to plumb-in your GS/3 or Vivaldi?  Not a problem. Our barista educator Chris Ryan will show you step-by-step how to set up your new machine and answer all of your questions.  In Technicolor!

Want to learn how to pull shots and steam milk from the convenience of your home on your very own machine?  We can help there too. Clive Cast will be offering an hour long version of our Basic Barista class through Skype or FaceTime. The team at Clive is excited to extend the benefits of our barista class beyond Portland to help out customers all over the nation.

The option to experience Clive Cast is available to all customers, local or national.  Just make sure that you have the most updated version of Skype or FaceTime and the convenience of at home support is just a few clicks away.

For more information visit our Clive Classes section here!

Details and schedules will be posted soon.

We’ve put together some fantastic deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday! To get the deals, note the coupon code in each box below and type it into the “coupon” field at checkout. The amounts listed will be deducted from your order. For our Double Gift Certificates promotion, click the box below for details on how to redeem. As always, these promotions are valid on purchases made 11/23-11/26 and cannot be applied to prior purchases. Considering an espresso machine? Give us a call and we’ll spend the time to put together the perfect setup for your needs and budget. Our prices are competitive and the knowledge is free! Give Chris a call at 800.520.2890 or chris@clivecoffee.com.

The KONE Coffee Filter has arrived at the Clive office! The finer hole pattern on this reusable filter makes it easier to control extraction and limit fines, allowing for a full and nuanced cup. Paired with the Bonavita Variable Temperature Kettle, the possibility for intricate expressions of your coffee are easily within reach.

I was excited when I heard that Quickmill was coming out with a new take on the E61 double boiler design. The QM67 looked to be strong contender in the prosumer espresso lineup, especially since it was being placed as a bridge between the Andreja and Alex Duetto II. It features a professional E61 group with a clean, minimalist design. It will be a welcome choice for those that don’t have the counter real estate for the Duetto, and it’s $500 cheaper.

However, the reduced footprint and configuration exposes several issues with temperature stability and power management. Despite these drawbacks, is the QM67 a better value than the similarly priced Andreja or the more expensive Duetto? Well, that depends on what you are wanting to get from your machine.

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Left Coast Roast, by Hanna Neuschwander, is a caffeine-fueled guide to 55 key companies in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California — from small artisan roasters like Heart, Coava, and Kuma and history-making icons like Peet’s and Starbucks, to rapidly expanding shops like Portland’s Stumptown and San Francisco’s Blue Bottle. Profiles describe each company’s background, roasting history, and style, and explain how to visit and order beans for home brewing. Not to toot our own horn too much, but there’s a great little writeup about Clive in this book as well.

Timber Press is hosting a launch event at Spirit of 77 in Portland on Monday, August 27. Come on down and enjoy specialty cocktails, coffee-inspired beer, hors d’oeuvres, and many other delights as we kick-off the exciting release of the book and celebrate the craft of West Coast coffee!

This wonderful micro-lot comes from the efforts of 20 small farmers in and around the mountain village of Santa Maria de Jesus. It features vibrant notes of cinnamon, dark cherry, and orange blossom.

The Guatemala Santa Maria De Jesus is sourced directly by Coffee Shrub and is only available through Coffee Roasters’ United.

The Santa Maria particularly shines on a Chemex. Watch our brewing guide for tips on how to achieve a full and sweet brew.

In recent years, the idea of espresso and the “god shot” have reached almost mythological proportions. Like the great Titan Atlas, the perfect shot balances upon so many ephemeral pillars, and baristas the world over are racing to discover the perfect technique. For many, espresso represents coffee in its quintessential form. It is an indeed an art that, when performed skillfully, produces a drink that is at once bold, elegant, sweet, and as complex as its long history – a history that spans across the decades.

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When talking about iced coffee, one will generally encounter two schools of opinion when it comes to the best brewing method: hot or cold. Neither method is necessarily “correct,” and preference depends entirely on what you are trying to get out of the cold brew experience. Brewing hot, as in the Japanese iced method, tends to preserve more of the delicate fruit and citrus tones and is well suited for highlighting the top notes of a high grown African coffee. Brewing cold, on the other hand, minimizes a coffee’s acidity (the fruit, floral, and citrus notes), and allows a coffee’s natural sweetness to show through.  A Brazilian or Indonesian coffee brewed on the Yama Cold Brew Drip Tower would be both crisp and sweet with a neutral acidity.  The only downside is that this process takes 8 hours to complete, but the reserved acidity is well worth the time for many. Read more…

E61 Brew Group on the Izzo Duetto II

As we wait for the Rocket R58 to join the Izzo Duetto II in our office later this month, I thought perhaps now would be an opportune time to examine just what these double boiler E61 machines are bringing to the market.

The E61 Brew Group has been hailed as the industry standard  since its inception by La Faema in 1961, but it has steadily been overtaken in recent years by the newer Saturated Brew Group design. The brewing group is open to the brew boiler itself in saturated groups, which results in improved temperature stability due to the group being saturated with the same body of water whose temperature is being controlled in the boiler. This design is only possible, however, with machines that have separate steam and brew boilers such as the La Marzocco GS/3 and La Spaziale Vivaldi II series.

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