Coffee made in Italy

No one knows coffee’s origins in Italy. It is presumed that it arrived in Italy through the port of Venice thanks to trade with the East. It found success thanks to the opening of the first cafés, shops that soon became meeting places, often frequented by artists and men of culture.

Black gold

Around the world espresso is considered one of the great crown jewels of products Made in Italy. Its success is linked to the history of its preparation and to the migratory flows of Italians who travelled throughout the globe to seek their fortune. Before the 1900s coffee was brewed by infusion. After being coarsely ground, it was left in contact with water for a few minutes.  Subsequently it was filtered through pieces of linen. In 1900 everything changed.
The first espresso machine was patented in Italy, manufactured by Pavoni based on the patent of Luigi Bezzera, who had revised the project from years before developed by Angelo Moriondo. Using a complex steam system, the machine recalled the express trains leaving the stations.
Hence the name. In the postwar period a new invention revolutionized the world of coffee: Achille Gaggia offered a machine with a lever. The water pressure on the coffee cake allowed the formation of the cream, a distinguishing characteristic of espresso. In 1961 a revolutionary machine was developed. The Faema E61, the first machine to use a volumetric pump to push the water onto the coffee cake at a constant pressure of 9 atmospheres needed to produce the espresso.

Sensory analysis

Today coffee is the most consumed drink in the world, but perhaps the least known. How many people know the rules to understand if the coffee they are drinking is made in a professional manner? And yet, since the 1950s, a sensory science has developed that involves chemistry, psychology, marketing, statistics and philosophy and that helps define espresso as an excellent coffee. The nose and the mouth are fundamental. The nose receives chemical signals and translates them into electrical signals transmitted to the central nervous system.
Some specialized cells in the mouth contribute to defining the flavour. Taste buds on the tongue perceive the sweet, the salty, the sour, the bitter, and the umami (savoury). So, for example, the acid taste of Arabica is pleasant only if it is not excessive. In the mouth you can also perceive the thermal density or astringency generated by the heat of the drink, which should be tasted at a temperature that does not exceed 67°C. When analysing espresso, the first step is a visual analysis of the cream, assessing its texture. The cream is an emulsion of lipids, carbon dioxide and some colloidal substances like water produced by the pressure exerted by the espresso machine during extraction. The colour is derived from the degree of toasting, the texture from the species and the freshness of the product. Robusta creates a frothy cream of a dark hazelnut colour, Arabica a light hazelnut cream with a shiny texture.
The tasting of the coffee will tell us about its body, acidity, intensity, and astringency.

Arabica and Robusta

The coffee plant is a tree, part of the Rubiaceae family, and is divided into two categories: Arabica and Robusta. They are two species that give coffee different flavours. The former, the most valuable, has a sweeter taste, sometimes with spikes of acidity, an important aroma ranging from floral scents to red and ripe fruit to the notes of chocolate and nuts. The Canephora coffee species, more commonly known as Robusta, has woody notes of licorice, bitter cocoa, tobacco, sometimes of burnt rubber, often a bitter and astringent taste.