Italy’s democratic espresso culture

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, you are a bit of a rare breed.

JAMES HARPER: I mean, you're a self proclaimed coffee historian. You wrote the book, the excellent book, Coffee: A Global History, which frankly if you hadn't done that, this series would never have been made. But seriously, how does one become a coffee historian? What was your journey to it?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, James, it's a bit of a circuitous route; would you believe it, when I grew up, I really didn't like coffee. But the story goes back to the eighties. I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate, studied history there. I wanted to take a year to study sort of more modern politics and I went to an American University in Bologna in Italy.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And because I didn't speak the language, the way I learned Italian was in my interaction in all those little shops, including, of course, coffee bars. Yeah, where I spent quite a lot of time attempting to talk to the baristas as almost like a language exercise. Could I get what I wanted? And that's really how I got into coffee drinking as part of that whole Italian style of life.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I then wanted to go and do my doctorate in Italian history and working with this historian, a guy called Adrian Littleton, I was telling him about how I was really fascinated by all these small shops because it was so different from the UK, which is full of large chains basically.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So he said, well, there is, there's one place that you should do that and that is Milan because they have this newspaper that was written for shopkeepers in the late 19th century.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And so lo and behold, I went to Milano and I lived in Milano for about 13 months and I went nearly every day to the player at the library and read literally all the editions for 20 years. Plus of this newspaper, I published a book with a hugely sexy title, the Political Economy of Shop Keeping in Milan 18 85 to 1922.

JAMES HARPER: That's such a hyper niche. It is, but it is yours.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Now, Italian did get a lot better.

JAMES HARPER: And so I'm guessing once you became a professor of Italian history, that was a natural transition to coffee History.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Basically, I continued my academic career and I started by doing a research project into the history of espresso that I called the cappuccino conquests. And from then really, I realized that, you know, I wanted to be a coffee historian more than an Italian historian. And I eventually published the book coffee, a Global History.

JAMES HARPER: And you know, when you talk about the history of espresso, Italian espresso and its popularity globally. You being in Milan in the mid eighties? That was the time and the place where coffee history changed pretty dramatically.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Absolutely.

JAMES HARPER: When you had your head buried in the Milan library, looking at all the editions of that magazine, an American stepped out of his hotel and made his way to a trade show.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, the man known as Howard Schultz, I believe we're referring to Howard Schultz. Mr Starbucks himself became Mr Starbucks.

JAMES HARPER: And so what happened to Howard Schultz on that morning in the mid eighties as he's walking towards a trade show in Milan?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, James, I can tell you that because he wrote about that experience in his first book. I love to walk and Milan is a perfect place for walking. Just as I started off, I noticed a little Espresso Bar. I ducked inside to look around a cashier by the door, smiled and nodded behind the counter. A tall thin man greeted me cheerfully Bongiorno as he pressed down on a metal bar and a huge hiss of steam escaped.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: He handed a tiny porcelain Demita of espresso to one of the three people who are standing elbow to elbow at the counter. Next came a handcrafted cappuccino topped with a head of perfect white foam. The barista moved so gracefully that it looked as though he were grinding coffee beans, pulling shots of espresso and steaming milk.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: At the same time all the while conversing merrily with his customers. It was great theater. Oh yeah. And that is what gave Howard Schultz the idea he could take that theater back to America where at that time, Starbucks, they were selling you beans, beans for home, you know, and his sort of great breakthrough vision which came in Milan was the theater of the coffee bar is what could actually sell.

JAMES HARPER: So all this to say Milan Espresso culture back in the eighties is what ultimately created a seed that kind of has directed really a lot of your life 30th later. And Darwood Schultz completely revolutionized his way of seeing coffee, creating what is today the Starbucks coffee experience and now Italian style coffee is everywhere.

JAMES HARPER: And if you were to really break down that Milan Espresso experience that you had and Schultz had into its constituent components, I would argue that you have a combination of number one espresso style coffee, two, like a theatrical stand up bar culture and three, the coffee itself being extremely affordable to the point where it is basically democratic. Anyone can have an espresso.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So, you know, James from most of coffee's history in Italy, it's very much none of those things. And in fact, those three elements on which I agree with you have only come together surprisingly recently.

JAMES HARPER: And to tell today's story, we actually went to Milan and visited the Espresso Machine Museum run by the Rancilio family. Rancilio are also the sponsors of the second series of A History Of coffee and without the support, we couldn't have brought this free educational content to you today.

JAMES HARPER: I'm James Harper, a documentary maker and creator of the Filter Stories coffee podcast.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And I'm Jonathan Morris, professional historian and author of coffee, a global history.

JAMES HARPER: And this is the second series of a History Of coffee, a podcast where we explore how a tiny psychoactive seed changed the world and continues to shape our lives today.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, with exploring the history of coffee in Italy. First question first. When did coffee first arrive in Italy?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We first know of coffee in Italy, right? In Venice, the Great Venetian Republic, the big trading empire. Really? Right.

JAMES HARPER: Right. So this is like the 15 hundreds also around the time when you know, Yemen has just become the coffee growing powerhouse of the world and you know, coffee is being drunk in coffee shops across the Arab world, you know, North Africa, modern day Turkey.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. And we know that coffee then begins to appear in the manifests of apothecaries. So people prescribing coffee as a form of medicine.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I don't think it's till the 16 eighties that we have a first credible record of somewhere serving coffee as a sit down place in Venice. Oh, wow.

JAMES HARPER: So we now have coffee moving from pharmacies through to what appears to be a coffee shop of some sort.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Some coffee houses in Venice do have from around the mid 17 hundreds, a very rapid expansion in coffee houses. And the reason for that is because in the 17 forties, the Venetians banned gambling. Ok. And the Venetians were slaves to gambling.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So, where can you gamble if the gambling houses are closed?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: What you need is a front. So, if you have a coffee shop and then you have a room in the back. Oh, no way, no way. No way.

JAMES HARPER: I could speak easily for gambling in a coffee shop.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Absolutely. So the coffee shops first start manifesting, as I say in about the 17 forties and by the 17 sixties they're bringing in legislation limiting their number because there's too many of them and they've realized that this is what's really going on.

JAMES HARPER: So, coffee is clearly very popular because it's a front for gambling. But were people enjoying coffee, you know, without the gambling, just appreciating coffee because it tastes good.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Oh, James. Absolutely. There's actually a play written by the most famous Venetian playwright Carlo Goon in the 17 fifties. It's called La Botega Del Cafe, the coffee shop. And it has some wonderful snippets about coffee. You've got one of the characters complaining that even the Facchini Facchini, the porters, the, the, the, the, the low class people. Thank you Facchini veneer. Be a la, a cafe.

JAMES HARPER: So even the commoners come to drink coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly. And this guy who's the assistant in the coffee shop goes. Yeah. And that woman who I have to take coffee to every morning, she almost always begs me to go and buy her some wood. And yet she wants to drink coffee even though you're really poor and you haven't got enough money to buy wood. So you're begging for firewood. But nonetheless, she'll spend the money on the coffee.

JAMES HARPER: Now, Jonathan, last year I was cruising the streets of Padova in northern Italy because you had suggested that I visit a particular cafe to get an idea for what coffee was like for wealthy Italians in cafes in and around the 18 hundreds.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Indeed.

JAMES HARPER: So here I am at cafe Pedro lounging back, enjoying the view. I mean, this is opulent, opulent with a capital o so I'm staring at the bar. It's all made of marble columns made of gold. The chairs are all made of red velvet.

JAMES HARPER: And you told me that this is an example of the Grand cafes of Italy and Europe that spring up, you know, from the 17 hundreds onwards. So what are these grand cafes?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: These are wonderfully decorated ambience cafes in which wealthy people, the nobility, the bureaucrats, the merchants, but also I have to say, particularly in Italy, all of those sort of aristocrats who are doing the grand tour, the educational tour would come and frequent them.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But there's one thing that one would have to say and that is the coffee brewing method is not anything different from what's going on elsewhere in Europe or indeed in Italy at home. So probably by the time we get into the 19th century, using just the pour over coffee pot, you know, upper chamber to lower chamber.

JAMES HARPER: Kind of like the Neapolitan coffee maker. And if you don't know what that looks like, we've got a link in the Reitz.

JAMES HARPER: So now I'm kind of confused because we're at the beginning of the 20th century and that coffee experience that Howard Schultz had, you know, stand up bar culture espresso coffee and it being very affordable for every Italian like we're nowhere near that yet and it's only just over 100 years ago.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, that's right. But we are about to enter a period of rapid, rapid change, espresso style change. So let's start though with where that stand up bar culture begins. Tell me OK, so that originates, James, with the appearance in Italy of what became known in Italian as the American bar, the American bar. And those began spreading in Italy around the end of the 19th century. So in the principal cities with trade money and so.

JAMES HARPER: For example, Milan.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly, Milan, the commercial heart of Italy.

JAMES HARPER: And Jonathan to better demonstrate how stand up bar culture worked in Italy. 100 or so years ago, we actually met up in Milan ourselves to retrace the steps of a typical patron of this American bar. This cocktail bar, let's go on an evening stroll before dinner.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: A very good idea. Yeah. So what we did was, James, was retrace the steps of a typical Milan stockbroker at the end of a hard day in the early 20th century, we actually met, didn't we just outside the Bank Of Commer Charlie?

JAMES HARPER: So, what are we looking at?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. Well, this is the plaza. We have the Bank Of Coma Chali Italiana. Very, very big finance institution.

JAMES HARPER: So, we were pretending to be stock traders from 100 and 20 odd years ago. And we would have left work at, I don't know, about five o'clock. What would 1/19 century stock trader do on a weekday evening in Milan?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You know what's right by just the world's most famous opera house. I think you'd go to the opera, don't you?

JAMES HARPER: And yeah, the world went on la gla was literally next door to the bunker Comal where you might have worked. Oh, that's LaSala. It's such a nondescript building.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, you think so, but until you get inside and let's say, you know, you want to impress a client who's in town, probably son of a wealthy landowner kind of person, you feel that if you just impress them a little treat them nice, the could end out well for you. So you're going to take them to the opera because this is Milan culture.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But of course, what are you going to do before you get to the opera? Well, you got a couple of hours to kill, right. So you're going to take them through the most prestigious place to be seen in Milan. You're gonna walk through the Galleria Vittoria Manual. The second. It's extremely grand.

JAMES HARPER: The Galleria, I mean, you have this glass, heaven knows, 15 m high above us.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I mean, if you're a 1/19 century resident of Milan and you see this, I mean, your head is blown, you know, absolutely blown.

JAMES HARPER: So the Galleria, as far as I'm concerned, is like a very high class mall. So the stock market broker trying to impress his potential client would have walked towards the Duomo, Milan's major cathedral.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's an absolute Christmas cake of a building. And as we come out towards the Piazza Duomo, right under the porticos at the very end, we find this bar.

JAMES HARPER: Which it's a little corner camp.

JAMES HARPER: This is still a stand up only bar.

JAMES HARPER: And I can imagine that our prospective client would have been very impressed. The bartenders so well dressed, I mean, white, immaculate suits, right? Little black bow ties.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So, you know, you've got to order the cocktail, the cocktail of the day.

JAMES HARPER: What is the most traditional thing we could get the thing you would have had 100 years ago.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Meto Milano Torino Vermouth from Torino, Campari from Milano Milano Torino. I'll have one to.

JAMES HARPER: I gotta say Campino like the space was spectacular, huge mirrors everywhere. A chandelier above my head that literally weighs about 100 kg.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You wouldn't want to be standing underneath that if it fell. Would you and Jonathan?

JAMES HARPER: While we were enjoying our cocktails, we were stood at the bar and there was like a queue of people waiting to take our spot at the bar behind us.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But this is the great thing about the cocktail bar. This is the great thing about stand up culture, isn't it? There are no waiters because the waiters are the barman behind the counters. It's a very swift surface. Extremely. Yeah, this is a straight over the counter service, straight to you.

JAMES HARPER: And so this is the origins of stand up culture.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It absolutely is. Yeah.

JAMES HARPER: But Jonathan, here's a question. But in the first iterations of these sorts of buzz, would we have seen an espresso machine here at.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: All in the very first ones?

JAMES HARPER: No, if back then that stockbroker had instead asked for coffee, what would have happened?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: There was no Espresso coffee and actually it would have taken some time to make that coffee and it would have been a bit of a downer frankly, you know, on everyone, a downer to take the time to make it a bit of a downer to be drinking coffee because it would have felt a strange thing to do in those surroundings where you really want to kind of show yourself off.

JAMES HARPER: So, you know, I could absolutely see the value that an espresso machine would bring in this American bar concept like Campino, you know, coffee that could be made fast, drunk fast.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But also a coffee that can, as it were, add to that sense of theater.

JAMES HARPER: So tell me about the first espresso machines that would have been in a bar like Campino.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The two people who are responsible for those first machines going in are both from Milan. There's an engineer, a man called Betar Luigi Betzer. But the guy who's probably of interest here to us is his partner, the man who puts the money in because the man who puts the money in is a guy called Deso Pavoni and Pavoni, which for those who don't know is peacock and Mr Pavoni is a peacock.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: She is an owner of theaters and of hospitality type places in the very smart areas of Milan. And in 19 05, they begin producing the first machine which they called La Pavoni Id Ali Ideal. And they get the machine out in time for the 19 06 World Exhibition held in.

JAMES HARPER: Milan and the World Exhibition. I mean, we still have it around today. It's like a place where countries come to basically show off to each other.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And we have a fabulous picture of their stool in the corner of this exhibition. Oh, yes.

JAMES HARPER: So I just googled the image. It's a very large hall like a market hall and you have this L shaped counter on the show floor and you have all these waiters in black suits, black ties, like mustaches and there's, there's like 2030 saucers in front of them.

JAMES HARPER: You know, the saucers which hold the espresso cups waiting for someone to come up to the saucer and so they can serve them a cup of coffee and in between them are ginormous fire hydrants with these big metal eagles on top.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Those fire hydrant looking machines are actually the first ever commercial espresso machines, right? And James can you read that sign above them?

JAMES HARPER: Yeah, it says Bezerra L Luigi, Bezerra Luigi Cafe Espresso.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But as you see, right from the beginning, espresso was being used by the manufacturers themselves.

JAMES HARPER: So we now have a name for a new kind of coffee. And where exactly are these new fangled espresso machines being developed?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Most of the evolution of these machines takes place in Milan and its outskirts. What we tend to find is that in the first place, these machines, they're being made in little workshops that are knocking out a whole variety of different things but are beginning to experience a demand for one of these that will go into bars. So there's about, you know, 2030 workshops that you could find listed in the kind of Milan Lombardy area.

JAMES HARPER: Well, here we are on a summer day on the outskirts of Milan and Jonathan a few days after visiting Caprino, we actually went to visit one of those workshops where are we, Jonathan?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We are in Para Bianco, which is a kind of a suburb, I suppose, just north of Milan. And we are standing outside of Aino today.

JAMES HARPER: This space is a beautiful museum with gorgeous antique coffee machines.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And this is, I'm so glad to be back here, James because I was here a long time ago. It's beautiful.

JAMES HARPER: But before Rancilio turned this into a museum, it was the original workshop that back in the twenties, the guy who founded a Rancilio the company, this space you know about as big as an apartment. This is where he hand built his first espresso machines.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, exactly.

JAMES HARPER: And Jonathan this bit was pretty cool. The Rancilio team had called in just for us. Bona fide Rancilio family. Rancilio royalty!

GIORGIO RANCILIO: My name is George Rancilio. I am the grandson of Roberto Rancilio, that is the founder of Rancilio. I'm the former president and CEO Of Rancilio Group.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. And for the next few hours, Giorgio took us on a journey through espresso machine history, explaining to us every major technological leap.

JAMES HARPER: And a lot of the material that we recorded here on how the machines evolved. Technically over the years, I actually covered that in a separate podcast, the Science or coffee, which I've linked to the show notes. But the key thing to know about these fire hydrant looking espresso machines is that they didn't actually produce coffee, which today we would consider an espresso is more similar to the mocha.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. Something more similar to what you get out of a beet mocha pot, you know, a somewhat weak watery espresso.

JAMES HARPER: And that's because they used steam pressure, approximately 1.5 bar and 1.5 bars is a lot less compared to modern espresso machines which use nine bars of pressure.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So not very much pressure at all.

JAMES HARPER: No. So just thinking back to that experience that Howard Schultz had number one rich thick espresso, number two theatricality and number three, very affordable, you know, number one dark, thick strong espresso.

JAMES HARPER: We are not there yet with these fire hydrant looking machines, but they're very magnificent. So, you know, the theatricality piece is slowly coming into play. And the third aspect was this new form of espresso coffee affordable for everyday Italians.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Absolutely not. No, I mean, this would only be at that point, the elite members of society, you know, the people who'd be going to the the kind of American bars and the Swiss hotels. Interestingly, the other thing is who's drinking this tourists are drinking it.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You know, this new form of coffee becomes fairly quickly an image of Italy outside the country itself, an image of Italy, despite the fact that so few Italians are actually drinking espresso coffee and now James, things are gonna get even more weird because we're now into the 19 twenties and that brings us to the most contentious period of Italian history, of course, that of Italian fascism Mussolini and the fascist regime because remember fascists come to power in 1922 it's really about 1926 that they consolidate that power into dictatorship.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And 1926 is also the year when they introduce a legislation which basically says that you shouldn't open places with espresso machines unless they are hotels for tourism.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Because espresso machine is encouraging the consumption of coffee and coffee is a luxury good and it has to be imported and we want to drive down the amount of imports because the fascists believe in what they call oaky. So kind of self provision and consequently, you cannot open places with espresso machines.

JAMES HARPER: Wow. So Mussolini's regime tries to stop Italians drinking as much coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And in fact, what we see is a decline in coffee consumption per capita. Now that's weird because what we also see is a rise in the number of people who say they're drinking coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: What we see is actually therefore more people thinking they're drinking coffee and using what they believe are coffee products. But what they're actually using are coffee substitutes. I see.

JAMES HARPER: So things that like on the packet look like coffee, but they're probably stuff full of things like chicory.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So coffee consumption comes down to about less than 0.8 kg per annum, which is lower than Spain, less than half of Germany, a quarter of consumption for France.

JAMES HARPER: That's wild. So all these Italians and the rest of the world are thinking, yeah, Italy and coffee. They go hand in hand. But the reality is they're not actually drinking coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's actually the case that fascism and coffee don't mix because you've got the image of coffee but not the reality of coffee.

JAMES HARPER: So, Jonathan, we're now in the late forties. The second world war is over Mussolini is now dead. I would imagine that now Italian life is getting back to some semblance of normal.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Chili in a way. What's really fascinating is that this is the time that that experience that Schultz has in Milan, the classic Italian espresso coffee experience. It's now in these next 15 years that it's going to come together. We're really going into the espresso period of espresso history.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. There are three facets, of course, we said the affordable coffee, the rich creamy espresso and the theatricality and actually where this starts is a major innovation in theatricality. By the way behind you is the world's most beautiful coffee machine.

JAMES HARPER: Yeah. So when we were in Milan, we also went to visit another coffee machine museum.

JAMES HARPER: Mum Museo de la Mape Espero Pucci mbali. And there was this moment where I saw the cool analytical historian Jonathan Morris getting a little bit emotional.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Wow. I'm so overwhelmed to see this. Actually, I know what you mean. The cor OK, this is the Geo Poti DP 47. This is a Pavoni machine. And they brought in the great designer Geo Poti. If you're looking through the world of design history, everyone will talk about this machine. I mean, just look at the sweep on that.

JAMES HARPER: Looks like an engine from a super fast car.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: As you see like a formula one car almost feeling or it has like a speed boat actually that layer of speed boat design and dear we have a link in the short notes so you can check it out for yourself.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And it's the start of a whole period in which actually espresso machine design, by which I mean, the aesthetics of the machine as much as the technology are transformed by you know, the employment of professional designers that leads to all kinds of new looking, very attractive machines.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But why bring in a world renowned designer for a thing that just makes espresso coffee because of the theater of looking at that machine, that machine is going on your bar. If you saw that in 1947 for the first time, you would experience a meltdown, anyone would.

JAMES HARPER: Espresso is becoming really great theater now.

JAMES HARPER: Ok. So by the late forties stand up bar culture, this theatricality that's already established, got it. But we still have two missing pieces to Schulz's espresso experience, affordable coffee and a much more thick luscious espresso. Absolutely. So in this rapid period of development, in the next 15 years back at the Rancilio Museum, Giorgio Rancilio showed us the innovation that gave us rich luscious espresso.

GIORGIO RANCILIO: And this start the era of the leather machine, piston.

JAMES HARPER: Lever espresso machines.

GIORGIO RANCILIO: So the barista with the lever pulls and charges the spring that release the energy and push the water to the coffee.

JAMES HARPER: And Giorgio Drano explained that these piston little machines finally deliver that rich creamy espresso experience that Schult had including for the first time Krema Krema.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly. And in fact, you know, at this time, they called the Resultant Beverage Krema Cafe. It wasn't cafe, espresso, it was Krema Cafe. Precisely to distinguish it from what had been known as espresso previously.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, now we're in the fifties. These li machines have been invented, they produce Krema, we have stand up bar culture, we have really theatrical looking espresso machines. I mean, the last thing we need now for the Schultz trifecta of experience is affordable coffee. So at what point does the everyday Italian actually start to enjoy this kind of espresso coffee?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So this is what starts to happen really in the fifties and sixties, James, because this is the time in which Italian society is massively changing. It's the biggest upheaval in the social lives of ordinary Italians connected with the transformation of the Italian economy.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: What's changing, what's changing is where people live and the work that they do. Because basically even after the war, the majority of people still live in the countryside and work in agriculture or agriculture related type things. Now, in that post war era, there is a massive migration away from those places into the Italian cities.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: They're taking jobs in industries that are beginning to be reestablished following the war and in services. So we're seeing a switch from basically an agrarian economy to now a much more urban economy. So there's a lot of housing being built.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: There's a lot of people coming into the cities who are getting very small places to live. So these people come in in terms of places to socialize, in terms of places to spend time. You know, there's not much options. So little coffee bars, preferably coffee bars that have a TV, become the place to go.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So a bar with a TV is a really popular place. The Italian bar, it's not just a coffee bar, it's an all day bar, you know, usually goes from the morning into the evening and it becomes, you know, a place that you go in the morning to sort of greet your friends with your first coffee of the day or to take your coffee break from coming out of the workshop or the factory.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And then it becomes, you know, your after dinner, a coffee followed by maybe a drink, followed by watching what's on the television because you don't have a television.

JAMES HARPER: They're expensive right back then. Right. Interesting. So it's really only in the fifties that the Espresso Bar, the stand up Espresso Bar actually, starts having a place in, you know, daily Italian life.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yes, that's right. But we're not quite there yet because we have the concept. But the concept still has to spread to every corner of Italy.

JAMES HARPER: So, how fast does this bar concept spread?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: There's about a third increase in the number of coffee bars in Italy in 15 years between sort of 56 and 70. Wow, that is the big explosion of coffee bars.

JAMES HARPER: So Italian coffee bars are exploding everywhere because Italians are migrating to the cities, they want a place to hang out.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And actually there's another further reason for that explosion and it comes down to some very important technological innovations in espresso machines. Yeah.

JAMES HARPER: And actually Giorgio Rullo showed us some of those innovations, the motor pump and he explained to us that by introducing an automatic pump that did away with the lever, it changed everything in terms of temperature control and the reduce also the margin of error. And the second innovation, Georgia showed us was the heat exchanger.

GIORGIO RANCILIO: The water in the heating exchanges is heated by the water of the boiler.

JAMES HARPER: And essentially what he's talking about is that the water is now heated up by kind of going through a corkscrew as it makes its way through the boiler. And they go into more technical depth in the science of coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But James the point is this, yeah, with these innovations, then espresso can be made much faster with much less disruption. And so how.

JAMES HARPER: Does this impact like the lives of everyday Italians?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, a great deal because this basically makes it very easy to have functioning small neighborhood coffee bars. So you could be a single operator, but you can whip out the coffee after coffee, after coffee without a problem. You can pretty much have one or two people running your bar and people coming in and out all the time.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So it brings the cost down, it brings the cost down. So all of these habits begin to form, you know, the idea of the Italian coffee break, you know, walk out the office, light up a cigarette, get to the coffee bar, back down your coffee, walk back to the office 15 minutes. Whole thing's done. Lovely, perfect.

JAMES HARPER: And this is it. We finally arrived at the moment where basically any Italian rich or poor, young or old can enjoy real 100% coffee whenever they want it.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So let's not forget what happened. Then after that, soon after Howard Schultz goes to Italy, he tries his coffee, he tries above all that experience and he goes on to spearhead the rise of Starbucks, the popularization of espresso style Italian style coffee globally. And that gets taken further by the global specialty coffee movement, which of course begins very, very espresso focused.

JAMES HARPER: So here's an uncomfortable truth, Jonathan, as you know, I'm half Italian, my mother's Italian and my parents live in Italy and every time I go to visit them and have, you know, an espresso in any regular coffee bar.

JAMES HARPER: I I struggle. I'm used to sweet aromatic espressos and these are anything but.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The thing is here, James, that what's happened is that, you know, Italy was the center of the whole of espresso movement and we now have that specialty movement in the rest of the world.

JAMES HARPER: Yeah, but Italian espresso mission companies are at the heart of the specialty coffee movement and are extremely export focused. And Giorgio Rancilio spoke to that. In 2020 the percentage was 90% export, 10% Italy and it doesn't stop at just exporting machines.

JAMES HARPER: They also open flagship stores and training spaces abroad. And to give an example even here in Berlin where I live the other day, you and I we went to Rancilio's BER Station which is kind of like their flagship store training institute. And I spoke with an absolute Berlin specialty coffee veteran.

NICOLE BATTEFELD-MONTGOMERY: I'm Nicole Butter Ford Montgomery. I'm the head of education for an Rancilio in Germany.

JAMES HARPER: And honestly, I've lost count of the number of coffee championships. Nicole has won but this site is a serious investment. I mean it's right off Kurfürstendamm, which is like a major shopping street in West Berlin and I got the impression they're putting in an enormous amount of energy.

NICOLE BATTEFELD-MONTGOMERY: I want this place to be sharing passion with other people. So they come here, we have a cup of coffee, maybe an excellent quality of coffee that I haven't had before. And then they go out of here being like, oh my God, I want to maybe make my shop better train my baristas a little bit more.

JAMES HARPER: And just to make another really stark contrast in Italy. If you go to an Espresso Bar, you know, the espresso machine is going to be pretty standard. But those same Italian espresso machine companies create unbelievable innovation for non Italians.

JAMES HARPER: And actually, Jonathan, do you want a quick story? Go on. So one of my first jobs in coffee was actually working for a roastery in Australia and we sold Rancilio Espresso machines and get this: I became the three month in a row top salesman for Rancilio machines.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Really fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

JAMES HARPER: But the point is this while I was working there, Rancilio had recently introduced this very new technology to some of the top of the line machines called advanced temperature profiling.

GIORGIO RANCILIO: I think this is a very revolutionary system.

JAMES HARPER: Basically, what they've done is found a way to change the brewing temperature over the course of extraction, right? So you could start your espresso at 93 degrees and you could program it to finish at 88 5 degrees of difference. You could also go the other way around, start at 88 go up to 90 three.

GIORGIO RANCILIO: And we discovered that simply tuning the temperature of the machine during the extraction changes, the.

JAMES HARPER: Result I remember playing this thing back in Melbourne and finding all these really surprising espresso flavors.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So I think there is an irony here, which is that the same machines, you know, imagine the nerding that can go on and I bet you sold them that way too with a machine like that. But I mean, basically a neighborhood coffee bar in Italy wants something that can turn on, do the coffee turn off bang. And the average Italian coffee consumer is looking for a simple Italian espresso experience.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Italy has been slow to adopt specialty because in a sense, Italy thinks it already does specialty because it's doing espresso as its mass culture.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan today, what are the biggest changes going on in the Italian coffee market? What are Italians drinking?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's not actually what's going on in the coffee shops. The biggest change is pods to put it bluntly, you know, whereas Starbucks is only just becoming a little bit of a player in Italy, an espresso cleaned up has cleaned the market and now pods are everywhere.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I think I've told you that I started my experience in Italy with a year in Bologna. I went back to Bologna a few years ago and there in the main piazza in Bologna is an espresso boutique.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I mean, I just find that, wow, there we go.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: There we go. Just incredible.

JAMES HARPER: So it's kind of funny when you reflect back on the whole story, you know, coffee comes to Italy. It also has a stand up bar culture. The two of them and espresso machine development come together, create this thing, espresso with crema. It's exploded across the world.

JAMES HARPER: It revolutionizes so many people's coffee experience. And yet in the country where it started, people revert to pods, you know, as somebody who considers themselves Italian. Well, certainly half Italian, it's not the story I wished had happened. Let's put it that way.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I do understand where you're going with that. There are some nice places that are beginning to do specialty things, but with an Italian angle to them.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But I still think it's the only country where as soon as I land, I'm literally in the airport, I will get out, go to the coffee counter and thump down an espresso. And I know it won't taste like a specialty espresso or any great thing. But somehow it makes me feel I'm back in the culture because that's the thing really, isn't it? It's a culture around espresso that Italy has created.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So thanks for listening to this, the third episode in the History Of coffee podcast series two.

JAMES HARPER: And do tell me Jonathan what is coming up in the next and final.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Episode, there's a country called America that is quite big. We want to understand. I think this American love affair with coffee. And what we're gonna show, I think is that actually through the medium of friends, we can come to understand that coffee in America is a bit more of a myth than it is a history.

JAMES HARPER: Dun Dun Dun. And if you are dying to listen to that right now, it is already out on the History Of coffee Podcast channel.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I got a link in the show notes if you're still interested in Italian coffee and thinking about that, go over to our social media. You'll find me at coffee History JM. And I'm gonna be putting up images of Italian coffee History through the ages, those great places, Venice through the grand cafes right up to what's happening today. And James, what about you?

JAMES HARPER: So on my Instagram at Filter Stories Podcast, I'll put up images of some of those beautiful ranch machines we saw at the ranch museum. So you can see espresso history up close.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Of course, if you want to get deeper into the History Of coffee, I humbly recommend my book coffee, a Global History.

JAMES HARPER: Great book, Heartily recommend it. And if you haven't already, please do press subscribe. So you don't miss future episodes on this channel. And one thing you can do to help others find this show, you know, are they coffee nerds history nerds, maybe coffee History nerds write a review on Apple podcast because that really helps the algorithm show this podcast to people who love history who love coffee.

JAMES HARPER: And another thing you could do if you are on Instagram is take a screen grab of you listening to this podcast and then post it on Instagram as a story tag me at Filter Stories Podcast, tag you Jonathan at coffee History J M and we can thank you directly, which will be our pleasure.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Meanwhile, I think it's very important particularly for this episode to thank Rancilio who enabled us to create this free education content about the History Of coffee. And of course, in this episode about the history of Italian coffee, of which they are an important part.

JAMES HARPER: And if you, the listener, are in the market for a homeless person machine, perhaps a coffee machine on your bar do consider Rancilio by supporting them. You're also supporting us creating this content and we have a link in the show notes. So thank you.

JAMES HARPER: The issue of coffee is produced by myself, James Harper and you Jonathan Morris and I write and play the piano music.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We look forward to seeing you again. And meanwhile, why not go off and get yourself a really good espresso.