Is it a case of "oh, how the mighty have fallen" or "I'm not in the business of promoting Starbucks?" or something else entirely?

The absolute darling of the last two SCAA shows for most (erm, most, not all), the Coffee Equipment Company's Clover, was a difficult beast to really spot this year at the show. I remember huge crowds around the Clover booth last year; this year, while Clover had bought a booth, it was filled with tumbleweeds and not much else this year - neither Clover nor Starbucks showed up.

Clover was the buzz word, and one thing I definitely remember the last two years running was the "have you tasted this?" effect on the show floor: each day, at least a dozen or more times, someone would ask me "have you tasted the coffee on so and so's Clover?" We're also talking about a product that won best of show last year... for their software!!! So hot a property, even their software (which is having the plugged pulled on any day now) wins awards!

This year? I'd say there was one high profile booth with a Clover (Intelligentsia, thanks to their proximity to the USBC smorgasborg), one medium profile Clover (Alterra Coffee's booth), and one sorta low profile booth (well, all things relative) that also had a Clover - coffee importer Cafe Imports.

Three Clovers in the entire show. I remember talk after last year's show about how some booths would have multiple Clovers, highlighted and showcased as centre stage. How Clover is going to "dominate our industry, and reinvent coffee".

Don't get me wrong - I'm not knocking those who said that, hoped for it, etc. I'm also not knocking the three operators of Clovers this year. I'm knocking the Clover situation. So many fans, so many zealots, so many people who either had a stake in it, or just fell in love with it, and now it's a Starbucks property, and at this year's SCAA, it seems so much like the beautiful prom date who was in a car accident and somehow horribly disfigured, and everyone wanted to forget about her.

Will we even see a Clover at next year's SCAA?

Here's the three that were at this year's show.

Clover at Cafe Imports Booth Centre stage here, because  it's how Cafe Imports was "presenting" some of their more exciting coffee imports

Intelly Booth Clover Off to the side of the super hot "Black Cat Project" espresso machine.

Alterra's Clover More "buzz" around it at this time than a few other times I dropped by.