On Jan 23, 9:02*am, cha bing wrote:
Article in NY Times on coffee:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/dining/23coff.html

If this is where mass market coffee is going, can tea be far behind?
This type of machine may never achieve the same popularity as easy
grab-and-go espresso that is popular now, but this article is
interesting for those of us who cherish the idea of brewing a perfect
cup of something. I love the fact that brewing tea is always a bit of
a mystery, and I love it when I do finally get that perfect cup.

It's annoying that they don't say how this machine should
be better than any standard vacuum coffee maker. My guess
is that flame is more easily controlled, and may be
programmed to stop after a time, or maybe even programmed
to increase or decrease in power automatically?

Coffee making is easier to automate than tea. It's all
ground so it has the same consistency, it always brews at
the same temperature and the same time. With tea, all of
this can be different. The clover system seems like it
could be automated to brew a perfect cup of tea by itself,
you'd just have to choose presets for each type of tea. It
would even be able to push a bricket of spent leaves into
a waste bucket. With coffee, it can, in theory, have a bin
with ground beans and take it automatically from there,
adjusting amount of water to amount of grounds as needed.
With tea, that's the only step that'd be impossible to
automate because leaves have different consistency and
there are types of tea, for example silver needles, where
dry leaves stick together.

The only auto tea maker I saw was similar to drip coffee
makers, and had only one temp for black tea, and it
probably uses much lower effective temp because water will
cool down as it travels up and drips slowly. Another maker
I only saw online has a separate chamber for brewing but
that chamber is made out of plastic. It seems odd that
there isn't anything close to an auto tea maker that'd
have variable time, temp and two glass chambers, for
brewing and for made tea. A bonus would be to have
programming for gong-fu style brewing (very low time settings
and slightly increased temperature with each brew. Another bonus
would
be automatic disposal of spent leaves, but that would mean
a much more expensive construction. I think we may see
some makers of this sort in the next few years in places
like starbucks and only then there will be a chance for
them to go down in price for individuals.