"Fine espresso that paints the tongue"

Striving for the best coffee in the world

Kanan pointed out this article about Ernesto Illy, chairman of Illycaffè and maker of one of the best commercial brand of coffee in the world. He was renowned as a scientific perfectionist of coffee and especially as an evangelist of espresso.

Even if I do not drink coffee much anymore (if you follow any spiritual path, coffee is quite bad for you ) I admire Mr. Illy's acute sense of perfection and striving for excellence in his art.

Coffee’s purest expression

Mr. Illy was also quite critical of standard sized coffee cups in favor of the espresso tazzina and was particularly disdainful of popular coffee additives such as milk and sugar which he viewed as mere cover-ups for inferior, poorly roasted coffee beans.

“Our coffee is twice as expensive as the run-of-the-mill
stuff, at least,” Mr. Illy told The New York Times in 2001.
“Our goal is perfect beans, zero defects, and we think we get
close to that.”

“Fine espresso paints the tongue,” he said of his favorite
drink, which he made a product of precision.

Mr. Illy was praised for his leadership role in the industry.

“He ran what amounted to the Bell Labs of coffee in Trieste,”
Corby Kummer, author of “The Joy of Coffee,” said of Mr.
Illy. “He was an international leader in the science of
grading and choosing the coffee; in promoting research on how
coffee should be grown; on engineering the machines and the
way it’s roasted and brewed.”

Mr. Illy, a chemist, was chairman of the company from 1963 to
2004. It was founded in 1933 by his father, Francesco, a
chocolate maker from Hungary who moved to Trieste after World
War I. By then, Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic, had
become a coffee hub, the most convenient place to receive
beans from Africa and South America and ship them to
caffeine-craving European cities.

Largely under Ernesto Illy’s direction, the company built a
laboratory equipped with sophisticated instruments like gas
chromatographs, infrared emission pyrometers and flame
ionization detectors. There, coffee beans are cut into slices
eight microns thick for analysis in an electron microscope.
Every step of the manufacturing process is monitored by
computers. There are 114 quality-control checks between the
time bags of raw beans arrive on the loading docks to the
time roasted beans are shipped in sealed cans.

Every day, Mr. Illy, along with 15 other people he had
trained, would taste every lot of beans that the company was
considering buying.

Disdaining standard-size cups of over-roasted coffee and any
sort of added ingredient — particularly milk, which he viewed
as a cover-up for badly roasted beans — Mr. Illy saw
something sublime in espresso’s vibrant aroma, potent flavor
and velvety, hazel-colored head of foam, known as crema in
Italian.

“He was a tireless espresso proselytizer,” Mr. Kummer said.
“He helped make people all over the world think that espresso
is the most sophisticated coffee there is and that even the
home consumer can be as glamorous as an Italian cafegoer.”

The company started packaging coffee for home consumption in
1965, and in 1972 was the first to sell it in teabaglike pods
for making single cups. Illy entered the North American
market in 1975. Currently, with annual sales of about $350
million in 140 countries, it is dwarfed by international
giants like Kraft and Nestlé, but it remains a prestigious
brand.

Mr. Illy studied engineering and ergonomics to design an
espresso cup that would most perfectly enhance taste — by
considering factors like the amount and fineness of grind and
water temperature. In 1990, one of his sons, Francesco, used
those cups to start limited-edition collections, decorated by
contemporary artists, including Julian Schnabel and Jeff
Koons.

“It takes 50 beans to make a one-ounce cup of espresso,” he
once said. “One bad one, and I guarantee that you’ll taste
it. It’s like one rotten egg in an omelet.”

[Source and copyright: New York Times - www.nytimes.com]