Starbucks launches a high-end coffee machine

There is a "black hawk" lying on the bar, which is something to brag about in a cafe.

In the traditional sense, the coffee machine is the "low-key giant" in the cafe, it occupies a lot of cost of opening a shop, but also represents the professionalism of a store. But it is not easy to buy a "value-for-money" machine within the budget.

But for Starbucks, the coffee machine is like a show of brand strength, and it is said to have a new machine being tested.

Today, let's talk about this swaddling coffee machine and the culture of coffee machine.

Carmen | Erma, from Seattle

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Starbucks will launch a new coffee maker

Recently, Starbucks launched a coffee machine called Patented Bottom Fill Espresso at its only open internal test store, the Seattle-based Roy Street store.

Since there is no formal Chinese translation, let's translate it into "bottom filled Italian coffee maker".

Take a look at the video (26 seconds long) to learn about this brand new coffee machine--

▲ looks like this new coffee machine, it's very cool.

The four coffee beans it can choose from are placed in front of the coffee machine, and the machine has corresponding processing parameters for any kind of beans, which can be regarded as semi-automatic.

Activate the operation button, and espresso overcomes gravity during extraction and surges upwards. And the side of the machine also has a foam device, small and slim but fully functional, making a cup of espresso is easy and gimmick.

But given that its output is slower than the fully automated machine ThermoPlan used in most stores today, the place where it is most likely to appear later should be a Starbucks bakery, or some of the selected stores.

In fact, Roy Street has been acting as an innovation laboratory at Starbucks since 2009, with some highly experimental acorn lattes and Japanese-style chilled macchiato first appeared here and then introduced to the market.

Today, the emergence of bottom-filled espresso machine is also considered to be a warm-up of Starbucks coffee maker innovation.

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In those years, the coffee machine used by Starbucks

Starbucks has changed its coffee machines several times in the past few years, and these different brands of coffee machines have sometimes even become its marketing point. And their change has always been used as a mirror, reflecting the changes of Starbucks in recent years.

In the past year, Starbucks' most topical coffee machine is a Victoria Arduino Black Eagle VA388, the legendary "Black Hawk", which is used as a competition machine in the World Coffee Competition (WBC). The promotion behind this is closely related to Starbucks' growing emphasis on high-end gold medals.

▲ Black Hawk Coffee Machine

If any coffee shop has such a semi-automatic boutique coffee machine, it can almost show its status. As a result, two Black Hawk VA388 appeared at the Sinan Mansion store in Shanghai, which opened in May 2016, which undoubtedly highlights the status of this store.

Before the Black Hawk, Starbucks bought a coffee maker brand called Clover Brewing System in 2008, and now this semi-automatic coffee machine can still be found in some stores in the United States, and the coffee it extracted is not Italian espresso, but rather like grafting a French kettle and a siphon kettle together for high-tech packaging.

▲ Clover Brewing System acquired by Starbucks

Further, Starbucks even used the LINEA coffee machine owned by the famous Italian coffee maker La Marzocco (the legendary "hot mom") in its early days. This semi-automatic machine can now be found in many small and medium-sized boutique cafes.

But because it largely tested the skills of baristas and required a lot of training costs, it soon disappeared from Starbucks.

▲ LINEA coffee maker

Today, the ThermoPlan used by Starbucks on a large scale comes from Wegis, a small town in Switzerland with a population of less than 10, 000.

In 1999, the small workshop company, which had only 20 employees at the time, was awarded an exclusive contract with Starbucks worldwide, and with the latter's rapid opening of stores around the world, ThermoPlan is now all over the world.

"Starbucks Imperial use" spread by ▲

As a coffee maker brand that once relied on standardization and efficiency, the automatic and fast ThermoPlan did help Starbucks complete its expansion in the initial stage.

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The coffee machine is not just used to make coffee.

In today's boutique cafes, the presence of coffee machines is getting stronger and stronger. Sometimes the fuselage is colorful, and sometimes it just highlights this part of the store profile.

Consumers are also taught to think that coffee machines are symbols to judge whether a cafe is authentic or not.

On the other hand, coffee machine brands are also looking for more room for development. Last year, La Marzocco opened its first coffee shop in Seattle, its first retail store outside its dozens of showroom around the world.

"it surprised me that people seemed to want to connect with our brand," said the head of La Marzocco's US market when talking about why he opened such a store.

Coffee machine culture, which may be regarded as a side branch of boutique coffee education, in retrospect, its growing status has become an element that can not be ignored.

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