In Mamis Caffè, our daily commitment is to offer our clients the best coffee we can produce by exploiting all our experience. Whoever drinks our coffee needs to savour the ancient tradition of this drink thanks to the innovative and cutting-edge coffee makers. Mamis Caffè represents the real Italian coffee culture we want to let the people abroad taste throughout its great genuineness. We want to export the real tradition of the Italian coffee to other countries, to attract the interest of coffee lovers towards our way to live this drink.
Coffee has been a tradition all over the world since ever. It’s the most consumed drink worldwide – people of every age, origin and status has a cup of coffee. We may say that coffee is one of the humans’ fil rouges, the universal drink par excellence. Everyone knows it, but perhaps not everyone exactly knows which the coffee plant is and what country it comes from.
Coffee’s mother is Coffea and it is a member of the family Rubiacee. Originating from the Abyssinian region of Kaffa, in Ethiopia, the motherland of coffee par excellence, the Coffea later on spread in Yemen, Arabia and Egypt. Around the seventieth century, the Coffea came to Europe, where it spread on a large scale in 1700. At the beginning the trade of coffee had a lot of success in Venice. In the current regional capital the first premises were inaugurated (“the coffee shop”) where it was possible to taste the new drink of exotic nature.
In addition to the linguistic origin deriving from the Ethiopian region Caffa, the word “caffè” has been attributed also another etymologic origin: the Arab word “qahwa”, which later became the Turkish word “qahvè”, from which the Italian word “caffè” derives.
Now that the geographical and etymologic origins of coffee are known, it is interesting to ask who did discover the most drunk beverage in the world.
There are several theories concerning the discovery of coffee. One of these, tells about an Ethiopian shepherd whose name was Kaldi in 850 b.C. who discovered that his goats became particularly lively after the consumption of small red fruits. Attracted by this discovery, he revealed this to some monks. They were made curious in turn and decided to taste the raw fruit, but they were disappointed by its unpleasant taste. The discovery of toasted coffee, such as we know nowadays, was rather fortuitous: one day a devastating fire burnt down the wood and the brushwood nearby the pasture of shepherd Kaldi. With this fire, also the small red fruits burnt and their pleasant aroma spread in the surrounding environment. The small burnt fruits had changed in taste and in consistency. Kaldi tasted them toasted and tried to prepare some infusions. This is how the first coffee was born. This beverage was so successful from the beginning that people called it “a gift of God”.
Already in the ninth century b.C. coffee was a very beloved beverage and it is funny to think that it was its bean, and not its pulp, to be the object of desire.
Nowadays we have to thank shepherd Kaldi for the discovery of this beverage to which we cannot give up any longer and which we drink every days.
Espresso, macchiato, cappuccino, in small cup, in big cup… drinking a good coffee is always pleasant, either in the morning for breakfast or in the afternoon at the bar with friends. However, before becoming this delicious beverage, coffee has other aspects and undergoes several production process. Now we will see in details the journey of the coffee from the plant to the cup:
The fruit of the coffee grows on Coffea, the tropical coffee plant, coming from South-West Ethiopia. Coffea grows up until 10 meters high, but, in order to keep comfortable the harvest of its fruits as much as possible, in plantations this is kept to a height of 2 m. Among the different types of Coffea, only Coffea Arabica and Coffea Canephora are important for the production of the coffee beverage.
Red and big such as a berry, coffee fruits, known also as drupes or cherries, include respectively two coffee beans, wrapped in two films: the silver film directly in contact with the beams and the parchment, much more solid, enveloping the silver film. Contrary to many plants loving the sun, Coffea usually blooms with the increase of rains. Due to its continuous fructification cycle – and in fact the two drupes do not ripen contemporarily – we can find on the same plant, and in the same period, fruits with different phase of maturation in the same period, some still unripe and some already ripen.
The harvest of coffee can take place by hand, through picking or stripping, or mechanically, shaking the plant and letting the fruits fall with the support of dedicated equipments. Due to the different grade of maturation of the fruits on the Coffea, there are two methods of harvest by hand: picking is the periodic harvest of the ripen fruits and therefore the manual selection of the ripen drupes; stripping consists in tearing off at once of all the cherries of a branch from inward to outward. This latter is a much more rapid method, but it has the disadvantage to collect dry and green drupes together with those ripen.
After the harvest, it is necessary to extract the beans from the fruit within a few days in order to prevent their deterioration. To extract the beans it is possible to follow two methods: the dry treatment where the fruits are dried in drying warehouses or under the sun and turned around from time to time before been pitted, and the damp treatment where the fruits are stripped into the water soon after the harvest, and once they have been freed, they are submitted to fermentation for some days, then they are washed, dried under the sun or in drying warehoused and pitted.
Through the dry treatment we obtain the natural or non-washed coffee while through the damp treatment we obtain the washed coffee, which is of a better quality.
Once the processing has ended, the selection of the coffee beans starts. Indeed it is important to discard those beans having not reached the right grade of maturation, as well as the damaged and the fermented beans. To select the coffee beans, we use optic selector devices, which, through a luminous equipment, start dedicated photocells able to discard unsuitable coffee beans.
This is now one of the main phase of the production of coffee: the blending. Together with roasting, this is essential as it characterizes and decisively defines the taste and the aroma of coffee, and gives the right balance among taste, aroma and the beverage flavour. The blending consists in stirring more raw materials in fixed quantities, ensuring always the same taste to the beverage over time. Further to the quality of raw materials and to the correct proportions of the single ingredients, the secret of a successful blending is to make it always before and not after the roasting.
Roasting, knows also as toasting, is, equally to blending, an essential process for the purposes to characterize the taste, the quality, the intensity and the colour of the coffee produced. After the blending, coffee is toasted at a temperature between 180-190°C for almost 15-20 minutes. During the roasting, the bean changes some of its features: its weight decreases, its volume increases, its consistency becomes more friable, its colour becomes darker, and the bean develops inside up to 800 volatile aromatic elements. At the end of roasting, coffee is cooled down at room temperature.
Based on the toasting, the taste of the coffee changes: if it is toasted at high temperatures, the coffee will have a much more strong and marked taste, while if it is toasted at lower temperatures in short time, the coffee will have a much more light taste.
Also the devices influence the quality of toasting: as a general rule a small equipment, used to process small amount of coffee, will give a much higher quality to the beverage.
Once blended and toasted, coffee aromas should not be dispersed in contact with air. It would be perfect to let the coffee rest in dedicated vacuum-sealed silos for 2-3 weeks before the packaging. However, due to the lack of time, it is usual to pack coffee immediately, immersing an inert gas, such as nitrogen, into pressure tins and packaging as this seizes, fixes and protects the coffee aromas over time. When opening the coffee packaging, nitrogen dissolves completely, leaving no trace within the blend. At the same time, coffee emanates its aromas such as decanting wine after the bottle opening.
