Aragona's chef de cuisine Carrie Mashaney was on hand with a collazzione for members of the media attending the roll-out of a new line of coffee-making equipment from Nespresso.
They're calling it a revolution in single-serve coffee making. The name of the system is VertuoLine, a $300 machine from the Swiss engineers at Nestlé. You insert a capsule and wait 20 seconds for the equipment to warm up. Then the machine reads the capsule's barcode to determine what to do next. There are 12 different capsules, from espresso diavolitto (high intensity, aromas of oak and leather) to a light-bodied elvazio (ideal for latte). Hazelnut and vanilla flavors, too, as well as half-caf and decaf.
Something about spinning the capsule at 7,000 rpm to extract the coffee essence, we were told, the process being called Centrifusion.
In any event, the resulting beverage is about half crema, several times as thick as the foam atop a hand-pulled espresso shot. You're supposed to fold it into your drink, the Nespresso folks contend. They've put up a giant dome on the parking lot at 2nd and Pike, behind the food trucks, to show the public how the system works.
Would be remiss if I didn't point out that you'll pay a buck apiece for the new capsules that make the "longer" americanos, 75 cents for the espresso capsules. Nespresso single-serve coffee makers have been around for 20 years (and cost half as much as the newfangled Virtuoline machines), but the genius of Nespresso marketing isn't even the concept of a single serve, disposable pod of coffee. Rather, it's in controlling the distribution of the capsules through a "Club." You can't buy Nespresso pods at the supermarket, you have to order them through the company. Diabolical, right? So who'd they get, in Europe, to promote the virtues of club membership? The most trustworthy man in the world, George Clooney.
All this does not sit well with environmental activists, appalled by the waste of millions of spent pods, nor with Nespresso's competitors, who face lawsuits when they attempt to provide refillable aftermarket capsules.
All too familiar for Starbucks, which went through this battle a few years ago when it began licensing its coffee pods to the company that makes the Keurig single-serve machines. In the end, Keurig started selling its own refillable pods.
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