Page 13 - SBrewing(Jan_Feb2022)

Page 13
Espresso machines: learning from the past and
building for the future.
Coffee shops have weathered the challenges of the
last few years well and have adapted their offers to
survive. With perhaps the exceptions of the city
centre office reliant locations, footfall is returning
and the buzz of people and caffeine is a pleasant
return to normality. Where the customer base is
transient, mobile coffee businesses, using all sorts
of creative trikes and vans have flourished.
We’ve also seen the UK roasting community, whose
reliance on foodservice clients was scarily high, find it was Gaggia who managed to both do away with
new direct home consumers and thus weather the
COVID-19 storm particularly well.
Really at the heart of any coffee shop is the skill,
passion and artistry deployed by the barista to take
the roaster’s coffee beans and turn them into a
drink that delights. A drink that delivers the full taste changed along with space travel, music, youth
experience created by the knowledge and expertise
of the roaster, providing lasting pleasure to the
consumer in the cup, with style, quality, taste, visual The story began in 1962 when British machine
appeal and perceived value for money.
If the barista is the human heart of that process
then for sure the espresso machine is the
mechanical one! Since Italian Achille Gaggia first
patented his pressurised coffee machine in 1938,
we’ve seen a constant development of traditional
espresso machines around the world. Although
often referred to as the first espresso machine, it’s is selling coffee-makers to Italy!” He then went on
worth noting that even further back in time in 1884
Angelo Moriondo successfully patented the first
steam-powered ‘espresso machine’.
www.beveragestandardsassociation.co.uk
JANUARY / FEBRUARY . 2022 | VOL.23
He was a great inventor but not a marketeer and
the huge boilers and increase pressure from 2 bar
to nearly 10 bar to produce the crema we
associate with espresso today.
You might think thus far that the Italians are
leading this tale so far and you’d be right. This
culture and fashion in the swinging sixties!
tool designer Frank Maxwell – now hailed as ‘the
godfather of espresso’ - stripped down a second-
hand coffee machine bought on a family holiday in
Italy. A year later Frank launched the business in
his garden shed and started importing and
supplying coffee machines to retail outlets in
Britain. In 1990 this business became known as
Fracino (a quirky combination of Frank and
Cappuccino!)
The company has successfully grown from these
humble roots to become a large and successful
espresso machine manufacturer supplying not
just UK food service but exporting to over seventy
countries around the world.
In a speech on exporting and growth in November
2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron
exclaimed: “Amazing! It’s not just the film industry
where Britain is excelling – Fracino in Birmingham
to install a Fracino espresso machine at Number
10!