Tea? Pah. Don't even talk to me about tea. I'm a coffee man, always have been. We coffee drinkers sneer at the teabag-danglers among us. Tea is for people who drive VW Beetles and think James Blunt is good. Tea is for Meg Ryan in a fluffy pullover. Coffee, on the other hand, is for people who think two Marlboros are a nutritious breakfast. Coffee is for Salma Hayek in black underwear, on a Paris balcony.

And yet for the coffee drinkers of Los Angeles, it has been a rough few years. Order a cappuccino in post-Starbucks LA and you're likely to be presented with a bowl of low-fat foam atop a thimbleful of liquid that tastes more like pipe residue than espresso. It was therefore with almost unbearable excitement that I learnt of a new caffeine craze over in Silver Lake - a district best described as LA's anti-Beverly Hills, where everyone has an asymmetrical haircut and a blog - focused on a new “coffee boutique” known as LA Mill.

There was talk of tableside baristas, $12 coffees and a $12,000 single-cup “siphon brewing” device known as the Clover, which allows superbaristas to calibrate temperature, water dose and extraction time, and analyse the data by uploading it via ethernet connection to a bean-management database. Coffee is the new wine, claimed my sources, and Starbucks is finished: doomed to spend the rest of its days fighting Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's.

The next morning I was sitting under a brass chandelier amid the faux alligator skin décor of LA Mill, staring at a coffee menu the size of a Harry Potter novel. I briefly considered ordering the “coffee and cigarette” (espresso poured over tobacco-infused whipped cream), but opted instead for a brew made in a “Chemex”, whatever the hell that was.

Soon enough, an attractive and chatty young woman had turned up at my table with what appeared to be a chemistry set. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the Clover siphon-brewer - that was a different option - although preparation was suitably elaborate and time-consuming. First the barista poured several scoops of Brazilian grind into a dampened filter made from the woven eyelashes of a thousand Peruvian virgins (or something like that), waited for a crust to form, then broke the crust with hot water from long-spouted pot, thus allowing the brew to drip down into a circular glass bowl below.

The result was so good I wanted to inject it into my eyeballs. Which is precisely what I felt as though I had done after downing the entire beaker. I was still buzzing like a bean grinder when I got home and read online that the maker of Clover machine had been bought out last week. The buyer? Starbucks. Bloody Starbucks. In the coffee world, there's panic. Will the maker of the Chemex be next? And what about LA Mill? Will that be acquired by Starbucks, too?

It's all a bit depressing, to be honest. As depressing as a 6am wake-up call and a mug of PG Tips.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die