Coffee school: our courses - the italian world of coffee and cappuccino

The DISCOVERY course is your way in the Italian world of espresso and cappuccino.
The course lasts only three hours and it is structured in order to offer both the gourmet and the coffee lover a closer approach to the world of coffee, and to allow all those visiting Florence to get easily acquainted with such an important aspect of the Italian way of living. The course will deal briefly but clearly with the main types of coffee, the processing, the ways to recognize, to make and to taste a good espresso and the secrets of a true cappuccino!

This course is dedicated to all those starting or willing to start a bartender career, but also to all those who, already working in a cafeteria, intend to improve their skills in terms of quality and know-how.
Quality deals with proposing espressos and cappuccinos prepared just as we do in our demonstrations, the way world champion barmans show in specific videos. Know-how deals with botanics, with the different origins of coffee, the processing systems, the capacity of evaluating the many blends that we happen to taste and the ability of describing them to customers and friends; with, eventually, the features of the coffee-makers we daily use.

In a strongly competitive frame, knowing "just enough" is no longer "enough". For our work, but also for the pleasure of knowing, it is important to be acquainted not only with coffee but also with specific blends and single-origin qualities which we can then propose to our customers according to the time of the day (100% Arabic in the morning? 80 o 90% in the afternoon?) or the customer preferences (the chocolate aroma of Mexican coffee? Or the spicy one of African Arabic?). More importantly, this expertise will be put into practice with tasting sessions, in order to create what we call a "flavour memory". Besides all the notions about the coffee plant and the espressos, this course will make you discover Mocaccino & Co. Beyond cappuccino...

Cappuccino is a symbol like no other, a social event and a cultural characteristic of Italy. There are, especially in foreign countries, plenty of articles, essays devoted to it - and even a novel: "The Cappuccino Year".
That is why making an award-winning cappuccino is considered the best way to be remembered by the palates of our customers! This course seeks taste but also the personalization of art - or, the performance of art. Why not?

Coffee is a product as noble as wine, therefore we have structured this course with the same approach of a course for sommeliers. We start off understanding how and "where" we perceive those sensations that constitute the organoleptic analysis: acid, sweet and so forth.
We will then move on to coffee tasting: we shall try bad espressos, burned ones, too acid or too astringent ones, in one word: the worst of. Towards the end of the course our palate will retain a good memory of different tastes, especially of single-origin coffees from all over the world, with all their nuances.

The coffee-cocktail world is a big one, whose boundaries move forward every day.
We start off analysing the mixing techniques and the basic grammar of all the composing elements. From here we will be able to understand the role of coffee as a flavouring element within the overall harmony of a cocktail.
The second part of the course will explore the new frontiers: mixing is no longer limited to shaking!