Renaissance in Roast
Though the final brew was somewhat decaffeinated, my gratitude and grazie’s to Italy Mag editor Mary Grey for doing her utmost, within the compass of her diluent job, to retain the article’s essential flavor and heat.
Doppio? Noppio. In Lazio, Italy, specialty baristas and roasters are stirring more than the cup.
Something percolating in the purlieus…
Among the omnipresent “bars” to be spotted in Rome, “specialty coffee” dens stand forth like high-relief on her stone-wrought buildings.
Considering the belated start of “Specialty Coffee” (henceforward “s.c.”) in Rome city proper, you may well imagine a scarcity to be the case beyond the rims of the capital, growing scarcer with distance from the center, where the tastes and trends of tourists and the catering to them are less a french-pressing concern.
But there are stirrings about in the provinces.
The more refined sort of bean-sipper rejoice: Following a lumbering start, greater Rome is undergoing a quickening change. This recent bloom (to employ a pun which perhaps only coffee “enthusiasts” will appreciate) is the credit of a chapped and calloused handful of visionaries, who first set this cold kettle to the boil. After much investiture of time, more of patience, it is heating up: Who can foretell the future of coffee in Lazio, when it actually gets a-rollin’?
At the least, these trends indicate a rethinking, a reassessment, a reevaluation. At most they evidence the makings of a coming revolution—a Renaissance in Roast.
Dark roast was for the Dark Ages:
https://www.italymagazine.com/product/bellissimo-magazine-lazio-fall-2024