Learning Curves

Illy University

Think you're java-enabled and know all about coffee? Sky's resident barista, David Bailey, thought he was. But that was before he attended classes offered by Italy’s renowned espresso maker, illycaffè.

By David Bailey

“France has its Eiffel Tower, India has its Taj Mahal. And Italy has espresso.” Forget about the Colosseum, or that Michelangelo guy’s chapel in Rome. We’re students at Università del Caffè, where art, science and espresso converge.

Why would anyone go all the way to Trieste, Italy, and shell out big bucks to attend a three-day crash course labeled “Coffee Expert—From Plant to the Cup: The Path of Coffee”? And why is such a course even available?

“For us, coffee’s not just a product, it’s a mission,” says Andrea Illy, chairman and CEO of illycaffè S.p.A., the Italian manufacturer of the world’s most exacting brand of espresso—and the grandson of Francesco Illy, who founded illy in 1933 and designed the first modern automatic espresso machine two years later.

Fortunately for me, Illy and his professors happen to be steeped in the very same coffee doctrine as I am. And this is what separates coffee lovers (like maybe yourself ) from dedicated coffee geeks (like myself and the others attending Università del Caffè). To the family-owned company and the truest coffee devotees, it’s all about espresso. To us, espresso is the highest form of coffee, its quintessential essence, coffee elevated to a medium that can be, well, perfectly expressed. But only for those of us who have the right stuff, and that includes experience, equipment, ingredients—and, above all else, proper training.

And the Harvard of coffee schools is Università del Caffè (UDC), an institution of higher learning for people who, for instance, learned before the age of 5 to drink coffee-milk, served from Mamma’s ever-perking pot; who remember perfectly and with ecstasy the first cup of café au lait we tasted in a dingy Paris hotel; who bought colorful cans of Medaglia D’Oro espresso in graduate school when we could ill afford them, and used an imported, hourglass-shaped aluminum moka maker to scare the wits out of our spouses ("It’s going to explode!"); who crank up espresso machines each and every day of our lives. And UDC is where we learn a little humility in our quest to make the perfect cup of espresso.

“Use your body to tamp, not your arm,” scolds Giorgio Milos during a session entitled “Theoretical and Practical Transformation of a Perfect Espresso.” It is indeed humbling to realize you’ve been tamping for decades and doing it all wrong. “No,” Milos moans. “Tamp and turn. Tamp and turn.” I’m surrounded by baristas who have made thousands of ristrettos, lungos, doppios, macchiatos and cappuccinos to my hundreds. Xherant Poda from Tirane, Albania. Nguyen Tien Dung from Hanoi, Vietnam. Jeependra Thapa from Katmandu, Nepal. Niklas Westergren from Stockholm, Sweden. Baristas from Malaysia, Bosnia, India and Brazil. And we all find we’ve got a whole lot to learn.

With Lombardy poplars swaying in the wind outside and the impossibly blue Adriatic in the distance, we’re in a classroom that’s on the same campus as illy’s headquarters and factory. The nutty aroma of freshly roasting coffee forever permeates the air. And on the very first day of class, Moreno Faina, head of teaching at UDC, has just set us straight about espresso being Italy’s Eiffel Tower. However, he goes on to explain, in an accent that makes English sound as mellifluous as Gregorian chant, that Europe was a latecomer in the history of coffee.

There’s the era Before Coffee and the era After Coffee.

“It was around the first half of the 17th century that artists and writers in Venice and Vienna discovered from the Turkish the wonders of coffee,” says no less than Chairman Illy, who from time to time makes a guest appearance at the company’s coffee school. “And those artists and writers immediately elected coffee as the official beverage of culture.”

According to the gospel of UDC, Europe was energized and transformed in the After Coffee era. Democracy, individualism, modern culture—and, of course, the espresso machine—sprang up in this Age of Caffeinated Enlightenment. Granted, as Napoleon Bonaparte observed, “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” But after four or five cups of perfectly expressed illy espresso before 10 in the morning, this particular version of the past sounds perfectly agreeable to me.

When it comes to the all-important topic of espresso itself (the word, by the way, means “made to order” in Italian), the university brings in a chemical engineer to teach the class: Marino Petracco, the man who quite literally wrote the book—Espresso Coffee: The Chemistry of Quality (with the help of a couple of guys named Illy).

To school us in the difference between a “perfect” (that word keeps coming up) cup of espresso and a substandard “pull,” Professor Petracco walks up to the whiteboard with marker in hand. OK, class, the perfect cup of espresso begins with 6 to 7 grams of dark-roasted coffee. (Arabica beans, but of course, and always Italian roast, never French!) The coffee is ground finely, almost into a powder. (We later spend no less than an hour and a half on grinding technique.) Next, no more than 30 milliliters (1 ounce) of water is heated in the espresso machine’s boiler to exactly 90 degrees Centigrade—194 Fahrenheit, not boiling.

And heads up, class, here comes the really important part: That water is then forced by a pump under extreme pressure (nine times the atmospheric pressure of the air around you), for a period no longer than 30 seconds, through a mass of coffee that’s been carefully and evenly tamped into a metal basket that acts as a strainer.

Those are the inalterable parameters, the mechanics of the perfect espresso. Here’s the science: Coffee beans contain something like 1,500 different chemical substances, some of which, when activated during the preparation, taste and smell awful, as anyone who’s had coffee late in the afternoon in a convenience store knows all too well. Because the temperature of the water is slightly below boiling, because of the enormous pressure the water is under, and because the water goes through the coffee only once and oh-so-quickly (as opposed to sitting around and steeping in grounds, as with perked, French press, filter and other forms of coffee), espresso contains less caffeine than regular coffee (look it up). It also contains fewer undesirable acids, oils, proteins and other compounds, and it has a little something no other coffee has: crema, that heavenly, thick, nut-colored foam on top of a perfectly drawn espresso.

“Fine espresso paints the tongue,” Dr. Andrea Illy is wont to say. Says Petracco, “Perfect espresso contains very small oil droplets that increase viscosity and fill the mouth with flavor and prolong the smooth aftertaste.”

But even with the world’s most expensive, computer-controlled espresso machines, even with the best coffee, you can make less-than-perfect espresso. In fact, we learn, there are 22 key variables in making a cup of espresso—and consequently at least 22 ways to ruin it: undertamping, overtamping, overgrinding, undergrinding, too much water, too little water. . . . Which is why illy has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up coffee schools on 11 campuses from Cairo, Egypt, to Seoul, South Korea (something like 22,000 people have graduated). And beginning this fall there will also be a UDC of NYC at New York City’s International Culinary Center, home of the renowned Italian Culinary Academy and French Culinary Institute.

Of course, illy’s professors, its CEO and its massive marketing machine, which has created one of the most respected brands in the world of advertising, are quick to point out that it’s impossible to make good espresso if you start with bad coffee. And they’re constantly making sure that anyone who will listen to them associates a “perfect” cup of espresso with what they consider the world’s only “perfect” coffee.

According to Petracco, “It takes 50 beans to make a cup of espresso, and one bean to ruin it.” That leads the way to illy’s quality-control laboratory, where we examine beans that are deservedly called “stinkers” and a dozen varieties of other so-called bad beans. On average, illy obsessively rejects 33 percent of the beans that growers present to them. Then the beans go through something called a Sortex, a combination infrared camera and computer that examines every bean that goes from the warehouse to the roaster, using a huge, funnelshaped dingus. When the camera spots a bad bean, “Pifff,” it’s blown into a bin by a stream of air.

And then there’s the day we sample cup after cup of “underexpressed” or “overexpressed” coffee, along with coffee made from robusta beans—the inferior variety planted where arabica refuses to flourish—so we’ll memorize what they taste like. One sip of the robusta coffee makes you appreciate convenience-store coffee, but it’s all in the name of education.

“The world runs on coffee and gas,” Petracco observes. “Unfortunately, the former sometimes tastes like the latter.”

From one perspective, Università del Caffè is really just an illy brand extension, a marketing ploy. The way illy’s got it figured, the more people learn about coffee, the more likely they’ll be to appreciate the difference between ineffable coffee and decent coffee. And some, like me, will set out on a quest for the perfect cup of espresso.

David Bailey, Sky‘s executive editor and barista, is thinking about mentioning espresso-dusted ribs on his barbecue blog.

ILLUSTRATION BY GARY OVERACRE; PHOTOS BY DAVID BAILEY