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Magic beans
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April 6, 2000 | Turns out it was acceptable for the children of the aristocracy to meet
the children of the merchants in a cafe, and eventually marry the money.
That worked. The dukes got the dough, the countesses got the cash and the
city of Trieste got some great cafes, a number of which are still open.
Experts long considered Trieste to be the global epicenter for great coffee. The Arab world knew about coffee a millennium ago, but it arrived in Europe only during the 17th century. The Austrian capital of Vienna was known for its coffee drinking, but it was the port of Trieste that became famous for bringing the best coffee beans to Vienna. And Trieste is still a center for fine coffee production. A perfect place to look at Trieste's balancing and blending between the traditions of Italy and those of the Austrian empire is a coffee company called Illycaffé. The founder of the firm was Francesco Illy, an accountant who had been drafted into the Austrian army during the First World War and stationed in Trieste. At the end of the war he decided to stay on and go into the coffee business. In 1935 his analytical mind led him to develop the first automatic espresso machine to use compressed air instead of steam. That was a big deal because, until then, most of the coffee in Europe had been made by boiling water and coffee together and holding it in a huge urn. When you got your cup, it had been sitting in an urn for hours and was flavorless and bitter. Illy's system was able to use water at a lower temperature that extracted only the best flavor elements. Illy also came up with a pressurized packing system that helped keep the coffee fresh. These days Illycaffé makes its own special cans, puts in the coffee, takes out the air and replaces it with a pressurized inert gas, which keeps the flavor in the coffee. At the end of the Second World War, Illy's son, Ernesto, took over the company. Ernesto Illy is one of the leading chemists in Italy and is passionate about the science of coffee. He knew that he could make a great cup of espresso, but he wanted to understand the scientific principles that led to the flavor. And he wanted to be able to calibrate those principles so he could produce the same level of excellence every time -- coupling the Italian passion for a sensual experience with the Austrian desire for control. The traditional system used by a coffee-roasting company to purchase beans consists of receiving a small sample batch of beans, roasting them and then taste testing. If you like what you taste in the sample, you order a larger quantity. When the order arrives from the coffee-growing country, you taste again to make sure that the shipment matches the original sample. Problem is, you are relying on your memory of the taste of the original sample and a series of tasting notes you made weeks ago. Although you try to control as many variables as possible, the process is difficult and not very scientific. So the younger Illy built a multimillion-dollar lab and is figuring out how to get DNA "fingerprints" from coffee beans. People still taste-test the samples, but now they also make a chemical fingerprint for the beans they like. When the main shipment arrives, they take another fingerprint to make sure that the beans they got are the same as the beans they ordered. Illy points out that "espresso, contrary to regular coffee, is mainly olfaction; maybe 60 percent is the nose, and only 40 percent is the taste. In regular coffee, you have 80 percent taste and only 20 percent olfaction. So the slightest defect is perceivable. We are trying to understand the complexity of the coffee flavor, which is a cocktail of many hundred components. We hope to be able to correlate this information with the genetic structure of the plant. If something is in a bean, it has been expressed by a gene that is in the DNA of the plant. We will be able to understand the excellence of a cup by looking to the DNA." Until recently, the only way to make a proper cup of espresso was to buy the best beans from a top-quality roasting company, grind them, carefully measure them into a machine, pat down the coffee with the proper pressure and send the water through. For a second cup, you cleaned the holder and started the entire process again -- not the easiest procedure, not always done properly by the people behind the counter and definitely not something that the average person is willing to do at home on a daily basis. So Illy developed -- and shared with a number of other coffee companies and coffee machine manufacturers -- a new way to make espresso. It's called ESE, which stands for Easy Serving Espresso. Just the right amount of pre-ground coffee is tamped down, then sealed into a paper pod. To make the coffee, you insert the disk into a machine with the proper mount and press the start button, and a perfect espresso descends into a cup. These pods are available from a number of coffee companies, including Starbucks and Nestlé. Since the quality and style of roasting vary with the
manufacturer, I suggest you taste-test a few cups before judging the technology.
I use a Pony Espresso machine and Illy pods and could not be happier -- or more stimulated by the results. Maria Theresa would love it.
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