Ryan Alexander, Evan Morrow, Aaron Gordan, Angelo Cellii

Intro

This past Wednesday our Social Media & Social Food class took a field trip to Dini Caffè across the bridge in Firenze. It was a really cool experience being able to try fresh coffee from a place that has more than eighty years of experience brewing coffee. At Dini Cafe they do the whole roasting process in house after getting their coffee beans from high quality farms that the owner has personally built relationships with from places such as El Salvador, India, Brazil and more. They mix a bunch of different beans together to make their specialty blends that each have their own different roasting process. 

Roasting Process

When we first arrived we were given a tour of their entire roasting facility. One of the first rooms we went into after going down a staircase with an antique conveyer belt was a room with a few giant bags of Indian coffee beans. This is where we were shown the three stages of what the beans look like in the process. The first stage of the beans were a peanut color and had a ton of thin shells or seed coats and various other pieces. During this stage there was a completely different fragrance coming from the beans; they did not smell like coffee beans. In the second stage the beans had a lighter tan color after being processed a little bit and it was just the beans with no other debris or shells. The third stage of the coffee beans looked like they were ready to be bagged, having the signature dark brown color, hard as a rock, with a strong bitter fragrance. After this we went to another room where they had more giant bags of unprocessed coffee beans from all over the world. This was where their processing of the beans happened. There were various machines and self made gadgets that facilitated the roasting process. In this particular room they took the roasted beans and put them in a funnel that drops them in a machine that air cooled the beans which is a high quality method. It is better than water cooling because not only does it not take away from the flavor, but it also keeps the beans at a lighter weight having not absorbed any extra volume. After this process, the beans get packaged into their signature packaging; and sent all around the globe for everyone to have the opportunity to taste their delicious Italian made coffee.

Coffee Tasting

After being educated on the whole process of making their beans we were taken upstairs to a little cafe area where the owner of the establishment took us through a crash course about more than 2,000 different flavor profiles that can be found within different strains of coffee. Here we had a friendly competition featuring the Bean Boys and four other teams. We were given ten different flavor profile oils to smell and use our senses to determine what the exact smell was. Afterwards she made us all espressos using one of their unique signature blends. The coffee tasted amazing. She pressed the ground coffee in the puck, and put it through the machine which uses nine bars in order to get the right amount of pressure to extract all the flavor out. We all enjoyed our espressos and some of my peers even had the opportunity to try a cappuccino as well.

Overall the tour of the Dini Caffè was an amazing experience, and was a great load of fun to partake in surrounded by my peers and experts.

Works Cited

Dini Caffè. (2025b, March 5). Eccellenza di Firenze. Dini Caffè. https://dinicaffe.it/en/