After a long rainy winter this month our students had a first taste of italian Spring! Warm, cold, rainy, sunny.. Perfect!

This coffee route started with a little bonus, the green coffee course where we explained the origins of coffee, botany, processing methods, selection, trading and so on. Our first day finished with some cupping of different coffees to recognize robusta from arabica, defects and qualities of different coffees.

The official week started with the Sensory Course, a lot of theory in the morning, the different senses, the process of sensory evaluation, training our nose with the aroma kit and learning the different tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami). And since it’s an italian course we naturally learned to taste espresso, evaluating the crema, aromas, tastes, body, aftertaste…

Once we had the basics covered we started with the first barista course! Some general coffee basics, the history of italian espresso, how the machines work and how to extract the best out of our coffee! After the lunch break, with our stomach full of penne alla carrettiera, we started making some cappuccini and learned about many other italian preparations.

The second day of barista was more practical: setting of the grinders, some more espresso tasting and then Latte Art all afternoon!! First the classic cappuccino, then the heart, the rosetta and maybe a tulip before closing time.

A full day was dedicated to the parameters of extraction like brew ratio, water quality and temperature, contact time, turbulence and so on.. Then we explored all the possible brewing methods and experimented with different parameters to taste and measure the difference with the refractometre.

The last course was important to complete our introduction to the coffee world with the basics of roasting. This course is mainly theoretical because there is so much to learn, but we kept some time at the end of the day to try roasting on the 1.2 kg roaster, just to see how delicate and crucial this stage of the coffee chain is.

We are glad to see many students with this much passion, many of them are following the SCA certification path and we are happy to guide them through it. Next month, after many requests, we are adding our Management Course to the Coffee Route where we’ll get an idea of what big mistakes to avoid, how to start creating a business plan and how much work is awaiting us if we’re planning on opening a cafè!