From plantations all around the world, Lavazza selects the best coffees to create the numerous blends that we enjoy every day.
The evergreen coffee plant grows between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.
It includes approximately 66 species, of which only two are cultivated and marketed: Coffea Arabica and Coffea Canephora, known as Robusta.
Arabica
Coffea Arabica represents today two thirds of the world’s coffee production. The plant is rather delicate and requires greater care than the Robusta variety; the beans are an elongated oval shape.
Robusta
Coffea Canephora (Robusta) is widespread in Africa, Asia, Indonesia and Brazil, and accounts for approximately one third of the world’s production.
From harvesting to processing
Blending, roasting and grinding
The excellence of Lavazza coffee today is the end result of the ideas of Luigi Lavazza, the first person to create our blends, combined with a hundred and twenty years of roasting experience.The creation of perfect blends is one of the tasks of professional coffee tasters who, thanks to their experience, have a keen sense of taste and smell. They exploit these senses to select and combine different types of coffee until they yield the exact flavour they are looking for.
Thanks to constant technological research, recent decades have seen a change from the traditional roasting system to a more innovative process, in which roasting takes place by means of hot air convection, in which streams of hot air are passed over the beans.
The degree of grinding (fine, medium, or coarse) alters the coffee’s resistance to the flow of water, which influences the extraction speed and hence the final sensory characteristics of the beverage in the cup.
Packaging
Coffee is a delicate product, sensitive to light, air, heat and moisture.
The R&D department is constantly working to develop new solutions that combine product guarantees, innovation and environmental friendliness.
Coffee Preparation
In Italy, coffee is prepared with a traditional moka pot or espresso machine. In the rest of the world, by contrast, coffee is prepared through the infusion method, as is the case with Turkish coffee, or through the filter method, as is the case with American-style coffee.
The quintessential coffee
Espresso is the type of coffee most commonly consumed in Italy.Its main feature is that it is obtained through infusion under pressure. The result is a highly concentrated beverage, with an intense aroma and rounded flavour, even though this was not the main aim of the new extraction technology, but to brew the coffee quickly. In fact the word ‘espresso’ derives from the speed at which the coffee was brewed (originally it took about 45 seconds), when it was made to order, just for the customer who had requested it.
