Intro: Insurrection | Revolution
Insurrection:
“A violent uprising against an authority or government.”
Revolution:
“A forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system.”
“A dramatic and wide-reaching change in conditions, attitudes or operation.”
[from Oxford Dictionary, online edition]
In the beginning, there was coffee.
It was a beverage, just like everything else. It was used and abused to survive long working hours, cold nights in trenches, afternoons spent bending over books…
It was something anonymous, a beverage brewed with no care and no interest.
It was short and strong in Italy, longer and milder in the Anglo-Saxons countries, brewed in a thousand different ways all around the world.
It was worship and idolized, but in the meantime it was trashed and mistreated by unskilled baristas and unconcerned customers.
And then, something happened: a revolution, a proper insurrection against the old coffee habit.
They started to talk about Specialty Coffee, Filter Coffee, Small Independent Roasters, SCA, Third Wave Coffee…
It’s been said that this insurrection started more than 50 years ago, right in the time when Beatles first treaded the US boards for the first time…
It’s been said that, since back in the days, this revolutionary counterculture started to undermine the very foundations of the old idea of coffee, to bring a new idea about the opportunity offered by this amazing beverage.
It’s known for sure that, at the end of the last century, a handful of brave heroes decided that it was time to stop drinking shitty coffee, an horrible product of the industrial revolution; and that it was time to dismiss the unskilled baristas that knew nothing about the thousands of secrets hidden inside a small coffee bean.
They created the first artisan roasters and the first coffee shops run by skilled baristas, real coffee-nerds that knew more about coffee that about themselves. They sharpened old brewing methods and they created new ones. And then came the hipsters, the geeks, and the young artists that, with their laptop close to the heart, were looking just for a place where to create the next best thing. All of them, and many more, were finally starting to understand that coffee was a lot more compared to what they knew. Coffee had flavours and aromas… coffee had all that wine had, and probably even more.
It was the beginning of the Coffee Insurrection…
“A violent uprising against an authority or government.”
“A forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system.”
“A dramatic and wide-reaching change in conditions, attitudes or operation.”
[from Oxford Dictionary, online edition]
[to be continued…]