One year on, those conditions have been met and the wishes of the growing legion of local cafenatics has been granted: London’s great coffee moment has come.

First, London’s best baristas are successfully weaning coffee-diluting delusionists off their morning bowls of warm milk to richer espresso drinks in progressively darker shades of brown. The 4-step programme advances from latte to flat white to cortado (aka gibraltar) to macchiato to espresso. The national chains have taken notice. Costa launched a flat white in January with great fanfare, not so much by improving the quality of its coffee, predictably, but rather through a campaign of hype: The search for the perfect coffee will soon be over with the arrival of the Flat White to Costa.

Secondly, the number of great London coffee shops which roast their own beans has increased by 50 percent. Nude Espresso has joined Monmouth Coffee and Climpson & Sons in this select group. Others tempted to do the same should by inspired by the recent opening of Caravan, the first restaurant in the UK to roast its own coffee.

Thirdly, filter coffee is at last a brewing trend. Tapped & Packed, a superb new coffee shop and espresso bar in Fitzrovia, Central London, showcases 3 of the best methods for preparing filter coffee – Aeropress, pour over (cone filter) and the attention-grabbing siphon, a two-chambered vacuum coffee pot that resembles some glass apparatus in a mad scientist’s lab. The new location of Taylor St Baristas in the City of London adds a 4th method, French press (cafetière). Even Gwilym Davies, a Londoner whose espresso-making skills won him the World Barista Championship, is brewing lowtech coffees through either an Aeropress or a pour-over cone.

Beyond these developments is the coffee buzz I am both feeling on the streets of East London and Soho and seeing overseas. In London you see new indie coffee shops opening all the time. In New York or Los Angeles you might spot the dragon logo for the influential London roaster Square Mile either on the company’s stickers or, sometimes, a bag of its beans acquired through transatlantic trades. (Baristas don’t exchange shirts, as footballers do. They swap coffee beans.) Tell an American coffee geek you’re from London and he or she will ask you if you’ve ever had a coffee made by Gwilym, whose reign lasts another two months. He’ll part with his title in June at the 2010 World Barista Championship, to be held in that great new coffee capital, London.

Starbucks was not seeking to buy indie cred, nor was it trying to undermine the bragging rights of small artisan coffee roasters when it acquired the manufacturer of their $11,000 dream machine. I suspect CEO Howard Schultz viewed the Clover single-cup brewer, which he’s already installed in a limited number of Starbucks stores, as one way to restore the passion and theatre of the Starbucks coffee experience (see his memo.) If so, he might have been better served by turning to Japan and the low-tech, high-drama brewer that helped inspire the Clover. It’s called a vacuum pot and home versions retail for under $50 in the US and under £50 in the UK.

Resembling some glass apparatus in a mad scientist’s lab, the vacuum pot (aka coffee siphon) consists of a lower glass globe for the water, an upper glass chamber for the coffee grounds and a filter-topped siphon tube to connect them. As the vac pot heats over a spirit lamp, the water climbs first in temperature and then in its globe, the steam pressure pushing it up through the siphon and into the upper chamber to steep the grounds. When the heat is removed from under the vac pot, the pressure drops and the brewed coffee is sucked back down into the lower chamber, leaving the spent grounds trapped in the filter.  In the old coffee shops of Tokyo and Kyoto it is a great show dramatised by the artistry and, in particular, the stirring technique of the meticulous barista.

The Clover technology borrows from the vac pot brewing process, using a vacuum to ensure complete extraction and no waste. And like the press pot, another low-tech brewer esteemed by coffee aficionados, the Clover allows the barista to control the amount of time the ground coffee stays in contact with the water. It may in fact be the best machine in the world for brewing a single cup of coffee. Unfortunately, the performance has been mechanised, too. The brew chamber is made of steel, which is cold and not transparent. There’s very little theatre.

Then there is the issue of price. Even were Starbucks willing to sell you a Clover, $11,000 is a lot to pay for a coffee brewer. You can purchase a first-rate Hario Syphon brewer in the UK for £68 from Square Mile Coffee Roasters and in the US for $90 from Caffé Vita.