STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 37 "Italians are gregarious by nature, and most bars are small so one just swings by, says hello, has a quick espresso and heads to work," Sandalj says. "There are few coffee places where one sits down and has a coffee and a long read. Most of them are shot-and-go." And, consumers not only drink their espressos in a hurry, they tend to prefer the local or regional blends and roasts their taste buds recognize. It's what they expect. It all adds up. Italians drank 4.78 billion cups of coffee out- side their homes in 2015, according to Statista, a statistics portal. That number does not include the countless cups made each morning in ubiquitous household Moka pots. By comparison, French coffee drinkers consumed 2.27 billion cups of coffee outside the home in 2015. Great Brit- ain totaled 2.1 billion, Germany reached 1.93 billion, and Spain counted 1.77 billion, Statista reported. It's easy to find a café. Small bars dot the commercial streets in most Italian cities and towns. Recently released numbers from the SCA reveal Italians spent more than $7.5 billion in nearly 59,000 cafés in 2017. In all, 90% of those cafés are inde- pendently owned and operated. Coffee is a business The Italian coffee bar industry blossomed in the late 1940s and '50s. Large coffee roasters, looking for a way to get their prod- ucts to consumers, began supplying interested small business owners with everything needed to open a café. That included an espresso machine, cups, furniture and, of course, the coffee. In return, each café owner was committed to only serving that roaster's coffee, and that coffee was most often a dark roast blend. The unwitting third party in this arrangement was the cof- fee drinker who, over time, grew accustomed to the blend. More than a half century later, specialty coffee advocates are looking for ways to wean them off the dark blends and try something else. "Coffee is the business. They give you money, furniture and (an espresso) machine. You put on an apron and start. The barista is not invested in the coffee," Caroli says. "Customers are paying (the business) debt by drinking bad coffee." "We have to break these (commercial) rules and go in an- other way," she says. "To make quality, we have to invest (our- selves) and be free to choose the best coffee." Leonardo Lelli, a Bolognese coffee roaster and an early force in the Italian specialty coffee movement, recalls a major roast- er's advertising campaign years ago that simply said "drink my coffee" yet never explained where the coffee originated and why one should buy it. "And today it's the same," Lelli says. "People all are drinking coffee without knowing what they are drinking. No one explains to the customer. "We started to drink coffee after World War II," he says. "Even now, a lot of baristas are not interested in the coffee. The big roasting companies don't care if you know about the coffee." Drinkers do know, however, that if they walk into their fa- vorite bar and place their Euro on the counter, they will receive their familiar espresso. And, Theresa Sandalj says, they "would

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