Near the hard-working espresso machine at Ritual Coffee Roasters, a café in San Francisco, sits a stainless-steel box about the size of a desktop computer. This box, the [$11,000] Clover, produces a cup of coffee with a spectacle of streaming water, whirring motors and an ingenious inverse plunger. Zander Nosler, the industrial designer who invented the Clover nearly three years ago, seems to have done the impossible: attracted a cult following for a new coffee-making machine that is both slower and vastly more expensive than other machines and requires the undivided attention of a trained operator... The Clover has social attributes as important as the coffee it makes. It was only after Mr Nosler modified a fully automated prototype to allow its operator to control almost every aspect of brewing that the Clover struck a chord with café owners and coffee drinkers... A typical American café spends around $50,000 on equipment, about one-quarter of which goes on an espresso machine. At $11,000, a Clover costs the same again. Yet the expense can be worth it. Eileen Hassi, Ritual's owner, says.. "the coffee is so good people have no problem paying $6 for a cup."