Italian coffee blends the TRUTH they are the ultimate invention

It amazes me how many people believe that coffee blending is a special art that only the Italians can get right. Unlike wine where the French learnt the art of blending by using the best local produce. Italy DOES NOT, and never had grown its own coffee.

Coffee Blending started out of a necessity of lack of supply. Italy in the 18^th century was not a country, it was a collection of city states. From WIKI "Despite a lack of consensus on the exact dates for the beginning and end of this period, many scholars[who?] agree that the process began in 1815 with the Congress of Vienna and the end of Napoleonic rule, and ended in 1871 with the Franco-Prussian War. The last città irredente however, did not join the Kingdom of Italy until after World War I."

This means that from 1815 essentially Italians favourite brew had limited supply. The Dutch, British and Spanish controlled the import and export route, the glory days of the Venetians controlling trade in the Mediterranean were long gone. Between them and the Turks they had introduced Italy and Austria to what was the worlds biggest brew.

The poverty in Italy in the 1800's caused mass 

emigration

So necessity being the mother on innovation, people started blending whatever they could to try and get the coffee they loved. And the blended all sorts of things to try and get a great coffee. Where before they had been able to relay on high quality coffee from the Dutch and Venetian importers, their choices where limited.

Add to this that at the same time the largest coffee growing regions started identifying that coffee grown in plantations rather than in highland forests suffered from coffee rust, and the coffee quality was been affected anyway.

So you have contributing factors:

• Italy is at war with itself, the Austrians, and the French, rations and imports are limited in the first place
• The quality of world wide coffee is being affected by the mass replanting of crops to be replaced by a lower quality but more robust distant cousin named Robusta, or Robusta Arabica cross breeds.
• The coffee culture at this point was quite strong, the Austrians and Italians driving demand in main land Europe, feed by the Dutch and French importers

Now wonder all of the most establish blends of Italy come from this period. When I see that a company that claims to have been blending since this time, red flags go up and I think to myself what have these companies have a reference point?

Blends are a way of getting a similar tasted no matter what happens in the year before with regard to agricultural results. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves what are we voting for when we support these products with our money?

Is a crop ever the same year on year? No, blending is not an art of taste it is an art of marketing.

Can an espresso filter change a brew?

I recently saw an advert for a machined espresso filter. I have always wondered how you can tweak and espresso machine, and seeing this is quite interesting. Can the size of the holes make that big a difference?

Well read what coffee geek had to say: (original link Can These Filters Change the World of Espresso?) Here is a summary.

Driven by an idea in a lecture VST redesigned the fitler basket to produce their own one, producing three different basket sizes. But it's not just the physical size of these baskets that are different: the holes, their size and placement are given extreme attention for each individual basket size. The four sizes are: :

• 7 gram basket (still in development, not yet available);
• the 14 gram basket (VST will call this a 15g basket, as it can hold 14-16g);
• the 17 gram basket (VST ref 18g - can hold 17-19g);
• and the 21 gram basket (VST ref 22g, holding 21-23g).

1. One of the things learned was the value of around 1-2mm separation (depending on the type of coffee used, but leaning towards 2mm) from the top of the bed of coffee and the bottom of a dispersion screen. For many testers, this was deemed the optimum clearance to allow for full and complete saturation of the bed of coffee. The vertical depth of each basket is designed with this 2g max swing in weight while still hitting desired target extractions as shown with an ExtractMojo refractometer test and Mojo's Brewing Control Chart.
2. Water flow through the bed of coffee was also exhaustively examined. Existing baskets, with a much smaller exit surface area vs a larger entry area on top for liquid often result in uneven, sometimes unpredictable extractions. The answer would be to maximize the bottom flat portion of the basket, with as many holes as possible to the edges. This is one thing the VST baskets do.
3. Other baskets have inconsistent holes sizes, and this produces grinds in the espresso and blockages, so the VST baskets solve this through a patent-pending (and protected) manufacturing and testing process. Where most baskets have a wide spread of sizes for holes (sometimes as many as 200 different hole sizes in one filter), the VST baskets, by contrast, 3 to 5 hole size spread for almost every exit hole in the filter. They are just that uniform, and that leads to better, more even extraction possibilities.

The baskets do make a difference, but the also expose bad tamping techniques


Update:
Okay so they are not VST porta filter baskets but while in Seattle I picked up the Strada ones, one getting home, and making sure my tamp was correct, I was really surprised how a small difference can change so much, the espresso was much better extracted, crema at least 50% better, and the espresso tasted good.

So if you cannot lay your hands on the VST porta filter baskets, then try a La Marzocco agent and ask for their baskets. They really do improve the expresso you can pull.