Espresso in Italy.

While looking through the forums this morning I found an interesting article that someone had linked about a coffee geeks travels through Italy and the espresso bars that she encounter along her journey. It was written by Erin Meister, who has some coffee connections to Counter Culture Coffee among others, but is mainly a journalist from my understanding. This makes for a nice read, which you can here.

There are few interesting bits that are highlighted in the article, first the changing of espresso as you travel from Northern Italy down to the south, which in turn the baristas also changed with that taste. And then if you go to the third page of the article there was a bit about her visit to Sant'Eustachio.

One thing that I did not know about Italian espresso until having read quite a bit about espresso origins is that there are regional difference in the espresso that served throughout Italy, just like the food! Ms. Meister starts off in the North in Venice where she finds the espresso to have a bitter taste due to the high use of robusta. She doesn't really find this to be too good. As she goes south to Florence the espresso changes to "dolce" or sweet like the espresso offered by Vivace. And as she continues south the espresso changes from the dolce to a much more chocolate toned espressos and this is where she found Sant'Eustachio.

If you do a little search here on roaste you should be able to find people talking about Sant'Eustachio, basically they are a traditional 100% arabica that roasts over wood. The interesting thing about the visit here is that one all the shots come with sugar in the espresso, not to the side, unless asked without, and all of the espresso is made away from the eyes of the customers. Kind of crazy that they would be so secretive of their coffee.

Now one other thing that I found interesting about her visit to Italy is that as she came to end of her trip and even more southern the coffee became much more local and all of the shots were pulled on lever espresso machines.

Overall, it's pretty interesting to seeh how varied espresso is in it's country of origin and really illustrates there is no right way to drink or make espresso. So pull on!