G. GIRANI CAFFÈ Venice Italy Review – Coffee University- - learn about the A-Z of Italian coffee from the supplier to most of Venice's restaurants & beyond
Once a week G. GIRANI CAFFÈ of Venice opens its doors to give you a short course in everything-you-need-or-want-to-know about coffee. If you are wondering why coffee in Italy, and especially in Venice, tastes so much better, you will find your answer here. G. Girani supplies coffee to most of the Venice restaurants and others in Italy. It doesn’t export to the USA.
You are welcomed into the small roasting room in the back of the small and quaint store, and given a stool to the side where you won’t slow down or interfere with Emanuele Andreoli listening for the first crack of the coffee beans in the roaster. In truth, he would probably hear this faint sound of the coffee beans announcing their roasting is complete in his sleep.
Talking non-stop, Emanuele nonetheless is keeping up with the roasting operation at every step. The scale that allows him to measure the 30 kilos of coffee he will ready for the roaster in each batch seems superfluous, as he can sense that too.
G. Girani is the oldest place in Venice roasting coffee the old-fashioned way- -using a 1947 roasting machine set for 180 degrees Centigrade. You learn that the bitter espresso coffee back home you may have trained yourself to stomach is likely roasted at higher temperatures and for shorter times. Not so in G. Girani, where all efforts are made to find the goldilocks sweet spot that takes some of the water out of the coffee beans as they roast, but not too much. Excessively dried coffee, we learn, gets rancid over time. If G. Girani’s customers don’t like the blend or roast, they simply return it. Watching Emanuele at work you imagine that must be the very rare blue moon occurrence.
Owners--Roberta Girani, and her mother, almost 90 years old, Gigliola Girani
Sitting there you begin to feel you are in the center of the world—at least the part of the world where coffee is king. Emanuele gives you geography lessons that span Ethiopia to Central America and beyond, sharing details of elevation and microclimates that make either Arabica or Robusta blends.
The graduation ceremony is getting to sip some espresso in the roasting room and learning how to do it the Italian way. Assured that the ground coffee put into the espresso machine was the appropriate color of a monk’s robe, we waited for this tour finale served in dainty espresso cups at odds with the factory feel of the roasting room. First you taste the coffee without sugar, and then with just a little sugar.
Yummmmm…
Emanuele then gives the graduation ceremony speech saying, “Butter, eggs, flour are all good; the cake is better.” This is your send off back to the little storefront room to purchase some of the nine specialty G. Gironi coffee blends. You too may wish you had brought a larger suitcase.
To help arrange a visit to G. Girani Caffe, or for referral to authentic Venetian restaurants, as well as visits to Venetian ateliers preserving traditional crafts, and other Venice adventures contact Ornella Naccari of ON-View Travel Agency, a member of the Divertimento Group.
