In recent years, Italians have suffered a 14.9% price increase for what is an indispensable daily tradition, the cup of coffee. The highest cost for a coffee at a bar is in Bolzano (1.38 euros) while a province in our region, Catanzaro, is the least expensive city (0.99 cents) according to data released by the non-profit consumer association Assoutients.
We met the expert Angelo Crucitti for a brief focus on the quality of coffee in Italy and rising costs.
What is an artisanal coffee?
“By ‘artisanal’ I have always meant a transformation process in which the presence of the physical person is decisive (the Craftsman), beyond this to make a product artisanal in my specific case, I focus a lot on producing only to order and in small batches at a time to ensure that the consumer can enjoy fresh, high quality roasted coffee with all its aromatic characteristics; finally, I believe that for a product to be defined as artisanal and sold as such it is important that there is a direct relationship with the consumer” .
How important is coffee roasting?
“Roasting is a cooking process that makes the bean brittle, grindable and consequently extractable. There are different roasting profiles that must be adapted to the type of coffee being roasted and the type of extraction being used, with the roasting you can therefore decide what to bring to the cup in terms of aromas, acidity, sweetness and body, but it is also true that not all coffee is the same, there are different types, with roasting, we transform a raw coffee bean which in itself it has specific intrinsic characteristics and if we are good at cooking, we can only manage to enhance them. In practice we cannot transform low quality coffee into high quality coffee with the roasting process, so the choice of the type of raw coffee to use plays a fundamental role in the quality of the final product sold in the roastery”.
What is the best extraction to best enjoy the cup of coffee?
“There is no best one, there are different extraction methods and each brings different characteristics to the cup, which can be adapted to different times of the day, I believe that the important thing is not to focus on just one method, otherwise you risk always drinking the same one coffee with the same result in the cup and consequently drinking coffee becomes more of a habit rather than a moment of tasting, with the different extractions for example we can modify the caffeine content in the cup, the acidity and the bitterness, my advice is to always use different coffees, with different roasts and different extractions. Bars should be the first to offer this diversification to customers.”
In recent years we have seen increases in costs in the world of coffee, in your opinion, what does the future look like?
“Making predictions is never easy, I believe that perhaps the direction is moving towards a new way of drinking and understanding coffee, up to now coffee has been a popular product accessible to everyone and also in large quantities, unlikely in the future this will continue to be the case between drops in production and increases in consumption. It will probably not become a product only for the rich, but it will certainly become less accessible, especially in terms of quantity, perhaps people will spend and drink less but a higher quality product, everything will cost more and consequently when things cost more the consumer pay more attention when purchasing and expect more in terms of quality.”
They say that in Italy the quality of coffee is low, do you think that’s true? And if it is low, why doesn’t the customer complain?
“It is generally low, few companies offer a higher quality product, in a coffee market focused on consumerism and low cost it is a bit obvious, quality is the first to suffer. Regarding the awareness of low quality on the part of the consumer, there are still few who are able to recognize the quality in the cup, terrible teachers have created consumers who are not very aware, just think of the strong, bitter, super creamy boiling black coffee, these are all negative characteristics that for years and years have been passed off as positive, over time our palate has become accustomed to certain tastes, the average consumer is now accustomed to the worst, so much so that he himself seeks out those specific characteristics in the cup. This makes a hypothetical change towards quality even more difficult, certainly the number of people dissatisfied with what is generally around is increasing year after year, this data gives us hope”.
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