by Taylor Clark
Painting the Tongue
The Italian port city of Trieste is an odd jumble of a place, situated precariously between the sapphire blue waters of the Adriatic Sea, the low-level chaos of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and the forested hills of Italy’s Friuli region. Crammed as far into the northeastern corner of the country as it can go without leaking over into neighboring Slovenia, the city is a multicultural hodgepodge of strudel shops, Vespa-riding Italians, monuments to James Joyce (who lived here intermittently for over a decade), chattering day-trippers from Ljubljana, and stately Habsburg dynasty–style buildings — remnants of Trieste’s past glory as the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (For a while during World War II, the city even fell under the iron rule of New Zealand.) So while wandering through Trieste’s gray streets and windswept plazas, one often has cause to ask: who does this place belong to, anyway? Apparently some Italians wonder about this as well; according to surveys, many of them aren’t even sure Trieste is in Italy.
There’s one easy way to tell that the city’s heart is firmly Italian, though: go into any café and order an espresso. To Triestinos, coffee is not something one trifles with. In unremarkable coffee bars all over the city — places where the unappetizing shrink-wrapped sandwiches and bowls of potato chips look like they’ve been sitting on the counter since the Habsburgs’ heyday — baristas treat each Euro-0.80 serving of espresso like a work of art, painstakingly measuring and tamping down the fresh grounds, then dusting off the portafilter with a paintbrush before locking it in and pulling the shot. Even in the bustling, rickety train station café, customers each get their foam-topped espresso in a white porcelain demitasse, with matching saucer. The baristas here have a lot to live up to. Since 1933, Trieste has been the home of illy caffè, the most quality-focused major roaster in the world; its square red logo graces the front windows of most of the city’s coffee bars. And imagine the pressure the baristas must feel: at any moment, Ernesto Illy, the patriarch of the Illy clan — and a man who happens to be the globe’s foremost authority on the science of coffee quality — might walk in to see if you’re doing his beans justice.
Not that Illy is much of a threatening figure, especially at age eighty-one. With his cue-ball head, huge aviator-style glasses, and wiry frame, he resembles an Italian Ross Perot — only with smaller ears and, if you can imagine it, more energy. If his family name commands respect in Trieste, it’s a respect based on admiration; Illy is a man who doesn’t seem to have much use for pretension. Unlike many trade secret–guarding captains of industry, he is only too happy to share every detail of his life’s work with the world. Indeed, the Illy clan has produced a book all about it, with help from scores of scientists: Espresso Coffee: The Science of Quality. (It’s a ripping read, as long as you understand phrases like “plurimodal particle size distribution” and “optical microscopy of emulsified lipids.”) When it comes to the science of coffee, the Illys don’t fiddle around; both Ernesto (illy caffè’s chairman) and his son, Andrea (its CEO), are chemists by training. After decades of research into every conceivable aspect of coffee preparation — including, for example, fourteen years spent studying different ways to grind beans — Illy has reduced the ideal shot of espresso to as precise a formula as man can devise. He has turned coffee into a science.
Illy calls espresso the “quintessential expression of coffee,” which is a sentiment most of his fellow countrymen share. The term espresso refers not to a different variety of coffee bean or a specific roasting style, but to a method of preparation. In Italian, espresso means just what it sounds like, “express,” and the name perfectly reflects the intentions of the drink’s purported creator, a manufacturing plant owner named Luigi Bezzera. Seeking to shorten his employees’ coffee breaks, Bezzera invented a machine in 1901 that brewed single, superconcentrated servings of the beverage as quickly as possible, using steam pressure. But the Italians soon discovered that espresso was more than a time-saver; it was a potent one-ounce distillate of the best the bean had to offer. As David Schomer, owner of Seattle’s Espresso Vivace, explained, “The entire purpose of this venture is to make coffee taste as good as fresh-ground coffee smells. And espresso is certainly the best method for doing so, because the short brewing time pulls the best flavors out and leaves the negatives behind.” Done well, the process yields a syrupy, naturally sweet elixir, with flavors so intense that they linger in the mouth for as long as twenty minutes after drinking. Done poorly, it produces an astringent, off-tasting fluid that has to be buried under heaps of sugar and a cupful of milk. Most of the world’s espresso is of the latter variety.
That statement isn’t meant as a slight to mainstream baristas but simply as proof that high-quality coffee preparation is incredibly complicated. This is where Dr. Illy comes in. “Between the coffee plant and the cup, there are one hundred fourteen steps where something can go wrong,” he told me in his modest office, a room dominated by science texts and stacks of research papers. “Every mistake is a catastrophe.” The goal of the system Illy has devised is to defend these 114 steps from impurity, methodically eliminating any flaw that could taint the coffee. In this quest, no detail is too small to merit extensive study. For instance, when illy caffè hired the Italian architect Matteo Thun to design its official espresso cup in 1990, the assignment came with a seventy-page document from Dr. Illy specifying how thick the cup needed to be, what the necessary dimensions were, which kind of porcelain to use, and so on; Thun later said that the only thing left for him to do was attach the handle. In Illy’s view, science and research had dictated sensory perfection, and nothing could be left to chance. “We need to have zero defects, no?” he said with a smile.
The top candidate for evildoing in the coffee-preparation process is actually the bean itself. Since heat is the only ingredient roasters add to raw coffee, the beans must be perfect to begin with — the roaster simply unlocks the potential within. And as Illy explained, arabica beans are complicated little things. “Remember, Coffea arabica has forty-four chromosomes. We humans? Forty-six!” He paused to give me a meaningful look. “All other coffees have just twenty-two.” Being such intricate organisms, arabica beans are prone to blemishes. Some defects are obvious to the human eye, as with unripe black green beans (which taste like rotten fish when roasted) and waxy-looking sour beans (which have a vinegar flavor). But other common flaws are effectively invisible. “Dirty” beans, “stinker” beans, and “Rio” beans all appear normal, despite tasting of (in order of appearance) wood, rot, and medicine. If the raw coffee has defects, those defects will show up in the final product.
To avoid bad beans, every specialty roaster employs a small strike force of coffee-tasting experts known as “cuppers.” Professional cuppers taste hundreds of coffee samples each day, grading the quality of each with machinelike precision — the best ones can even pinpoint the country and growing region where a coffee sample comes from through taste alone. These cuppers don’t take dainty little sips. Within the industry, the dominant belief seems to be that one’s cupping skill correlates directly with the volume of one’s slurp. Imagine the sound of Velcro being torn apart, but fed through a fully cranked-up bullhorn, and you have a reasonable approximation of a professional slurp. Now picture yourself in a room where these explosions are bombarding your ears from all sides as cuppers raise spoonful after spoonful to their mouths, add in a few comments like “I’m getting crab apples and paprika here,” and you’ve practically attended a cupping session. (There’s a justification for the violent sips, of course: they atomize the liquid and spray it over the entire tongue, revealing the coffee’s full character.) On any given day, the cuppers might taste a chocolaty Sulawesi, a sweet and spicy Guatemala Antigua, a blueberry-hinted Ethiopia Harrar, and even what’s called Kopi Luwak coffee, which, at $300 per pound, is the world’s priciest coffee. Why? Because Kopi Luwak beans are harvested from the droppings of a catlike animal called the Indonesian palm civet; the creature eats ripe coffee cherries and partial
ly digests them before passing them on enhanced, its special gift to the world. (The stuff is big in Japan.)
The cuppers’ taste buds guide them to the most promising beans, but even in the finest coffee batches, defective beans slip through the quality-control defenses at the rate of one or two per hundred. To Illy, this is unacceptable. “A serving of espresso is approximately fifty beans,” he said. “One bad bean can taint the other forty-nine like a rotten egg. These things can be perceived at much lower concentrations, because bad things are much more pungent than good things.” (This sensitivity, he says, is a product of the evolution of our senses of taste and smell, which arose in part to defend us from rotten and harmful foods.) To fully safeguard our taste buds, the only solution is to examine each bean individually and to remove the offenders, a task illy caffè carries out with the aid of cutting-edge technology.
When Illy starts talking about the scientific nuts and bolts of coffee, it’s best to grasp your chair firmly with both hands, hunker down, and just try to keep up for as long as possible while he volleys graphs and technical terms at you. He might be waxing lyrical on how espresso is like a beautiful woman one moment, but he’s always seconds away from explaining the composition of the polymers in her dress. So, boiled down a bit from Illy’s daunting explanation, the bean-sorting process works as follows. Defective and perfect beans might look identical to us, but one disparity betrays the stinkers: when you bounce light off them, they absorb slightly more of it than the good ones do. At the illy caffè roasting plant, four refrigerator-size contraptions shoot beams of light at every incoming raw bean — each machine examines four hundred of them per second. Whenever the cameras spot an offending bean, a puff of air immediately blasts it into a reject pile.
This optical seek-and-destroy system is relatively simple, but matters become mind-bendingly complex once the roasting process begins. Scientists have identified as many as fifteen hundred distinct chemical compounds in the coffee bean, and the intermingling of these chemicals during roasting is what ultimately determines how the coffee tastes. The temperature of the roaster, the duration of the roast, the method of cooling — all of these factors influence each individual compound differently. And there’s also the unique structure of the bean itself to consider. As raw coffee heats up inside the roaster, water molecules inside the beans turn into steam and attempt to escape, only to run into a thick cellular wall that seals everything in. Each bean is like a miniature pressure cooker, containing a maelstrom of chemical reactions within; the stress is such that the coffee bean expands in volume by half, before finally popping. Think of the whole roasting process as being something like juggling fifteen hundred different objects at once while standing inside an erupting volcano.
But if this is a little too much to comprehend, we can simplify things a bit. As most everyone knows from the old grade-school experiment where you pinch your nose closed and try to taste an apple, flavor is mostly a matter of aroma perception. This is especially true of coffee. “Espresso is for the nose, not for the taste,” Illy told me. Roasted coffee contains over eight hundred “aromatic volatile compounds,” but only about twenty-five dominant ones. The distinct flavor and scent of roasted coffee, then, is an olfactory cocktail made from this set of twenty-five ingredients, many of which are easily recognizable to the untrained nose. In a laboratory analysis of roasted coffee, a gas chromatograph will pick out aromas ranging from vanilla, roses, Darjeeling tea, and honey, all the way to oddball scents like roasted meat, cabbage, sweat, butter, and the hard-to-describe “cat scent.” (Let’s just say it’s a good idea to minimize it.)
As you would expect, Illy comes armed with an assortment of charts showing how different roasting techniques affect these important aromas and, thus, the flavor of the coffee. For any given aromatic compound — say, 4-vinylguaiacol, which smells like clove — he can pull out a bar graph that shows its intensity in the bean at five different roasting levels: raw, very light, medium (for Illy’s “normale” style), dark (for Illy’s “scurro” style), and super-dark (which is essentially the Starbucks roast). Desirable aromas always peak at the medium or dark setting, dropping off sharply on either side. “It is always diminishing when you overroast the coffee,” Illy explained as he showed me the charts for various good aromas. Next, he displayed a graph in which the Starbucks-style roast yielded far more of a certain odor than the others. “This is the aroma of . . . if you had a fire that has been extinguished by a fire brigade,” he said, trying not to smirk. “It’s called ‘wet fire’ scent.”
While most coffee companies offer dozens of blends and single-origin coffees in a variety of roasts, illy caffè sells just one blend in two roasts, and the product is constantly monitored and tweaked to produce the right aromas consistently. For Dr. Illy, there can only be one perfect espresso, and his tight control over every variable in the coffee-preparation process allows him to achieve it regularly. On a guided tour of illy caffè’s Trieste facility — with a security guard trailing ten yards behind at all times, ready to pounce if I brandished anything remotely resembling a camera — I saw the rest of Illy’s directives put into action. Pneumatic tubes transported the beans from the roasting plant to the packaging center, where machines dumped the coffee into airtight tins and flushed them with nitrogen to preserve freshness, before finally pressurizing and sealing the containers. At one of illy caffè’s two on-site concept espresso bars, a barista pulled me a shot according to strict percolation instructions; the water must be heated to exactly 194 degrees Fahrenheit, then pushed through the coffee grounds for precisely thirty seconds at a pressure of 130 psi, thereby generating a layer of khaki-colored foam on top called crema.
Given the array of chemistry equations, lab tests, and strict protocols that underpinned the steaming cup I was raising to my lips, I half expected the espresso to taste like brewed algebra. But this was like no shot of espresso I’d ever had back in the States, where espresso usually just means “pungent, extra-strength coffee.” The brew was viscous like a liqueur, with a honeylike natural sweetness, the result of caramelization of sugars inside the bean during roasting. Illy likes to say that the ideal espresso shot “paints the tongue,” which I suddenly understood after the first sip. Billions of tiny oil particles one micron wide were coating my taste buds and slowly releasing the aromas contained within. My tour guide, a blond American expatriate, advised me that I would detect hints of caramel, dark chocolate, and freshly toasted bread, which is the sort of wine-connoisseurish thing my taste buds typically refuse to do. To my astonishment, I could actually pick them out.
Many coffee experts disagree passionately with the idea that such a thing as the objectively proved perfect espresso exists. Taste, they say, is subjective, particular to every unique tongue. Good coffee, then, is just as much the result of art as it is of science. Said Schomer, “You’re talking about a sensory system of great complexity in the human mouth, and an elixir of great complexity that evolves each second.” Davids, the coffee critic, respects Illy’s approach but agrees with Schomer. “Our perception of quality is not absolute, no matter what Dr. Illy might think,” he told me.
There is one aesthetic judgment on which nearly all coffee aficionados agree, however: as time goes by, it’s getting tougher to find decent coffee at a Starbucks. But at this phase in the company’s evolution, superior coffee isn’t necessarily what it’s aiming at. For Starbucks, quality has become mostly irrelevant.
Beverage Entertainment
On an international flight not long ago, I happened to sit next to a middle-aged woman from Chicago who was returning home from a trip to Venice with her two teenaged children. We chatted pleasantly for a while about Italy and kids these days, and eventually she asked what I did for a living. By then, I had learned that disclosing the fact that I was writing a book about Starbucks and the coffee-house phenomenon was somewhat risky; many people have strong opinions about the company, and my revelation was often interpreted as an invitation to expound, at con
siderable length, on said opinions. But this woman’s response stood out. At the first mention of the word Starbucks, she became almost reverent. She never drank coffee before Starbucks arrived, but now it’s a “treat” she likes to buy for herself and her husband. “Oh, Starbucks has very good coffee — the best you can get,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”
Certainly, Starbucks has the best marketing you can find, but it’s been a long time since the coffee lived up to the ads. Once, back in the company’s evangelistic days, its paper bags of fresh beans included a stamped sell-by date, and its baristas possessed a near-encyclopedic knowledge of espresso arcana. The Starbucks employees of old preached relentlessly about quality, raising the consumer’s expectations of what coffee could taste like in the process; essentially, they made the average American cup of coffee better. The company’s early zeal so impressed Mark Prince, who now runs the popular coffee Web site Coffeegeek.com, that he becomes emotionally stirred when remembering the first time he visited a Starbucks, in 1993. Prince requested a ristretto shot — a smaller, bolder espresso that requires making subtle tweaks to the equipment. Outside of Italy, very few people had even heard of it. “The barista said, ‘I know exactly what you’re talking about,’ ” Prince recalled. “He actually went and adjusted the grinder and pulled one shot he didn’t like, then he pulled another. You’d never see this at a Starbucks past 1998. I don’t want to say it was as good as the espresso I got in Italy, but it was damn close.”