Homesick for Drip Coffee

Sandy Coffee Roaster- Arezzo

This week we took a trip to Sandy Caffé in downtown Arezzo, first established in 1957. This was a day I was really excited to experience being that my love for coffee is, occasionally, a little too real. Sandy caffe has nine different locations where they retrieve their coffee beans from. In house, they roast, test, package, and let sit for two weeks before they ship out their beloved Sandy beans. Mr. Veraldi, son of the founder, explained why the company was named “Sandy”, because during this time period, anything or word that sounded American was catchy and attractive to the locals.

              We got to tour and see each step of the process of roasting and making the beans into ready to use coffee beans. One of the important factors of roasting I found most interesting was that during roasting, the supervisor of the beans had fifteen minutes to roam around and occasionally watch the beans but the last few minutes they are required to stand over the beans and diligently watch as to make sure not a second more are the beans roasted if they are done. When roasting beans, a matter of roasting them 30 seconds linger can dramatically affect the beans for the worse so this position and time for the whole coffee bean process is very important.

              After this informative tour, we got to the goods. Firstly, the barista, also a worker at Sandy Coffee Roaster, made us each an expresso shot of Robusta coffee and them a shot using Arabica beans. I was surprised as to how different the taste was from each other. The Robusta coffee had a bitter aftertaste and a bit of a woody flavor as compared to the Arabica expresso shot which was much more smooth and silky. There is no question, Arabica beans are the preferred choice when it comes to coffee beans for their amazingly smooth taste. Though I thought of myself as of somewhat “coffee person”, my appreciation and knowledge has grown vastly while being here in Italy and even more so after the trip and tour of the Sandy Coffee Roaster in Arezzo. If I didn’t already value coffee before coming on this trip, learning about the roasting process and the care that goes into roasting the beans perfectly has grown my love and appreciation for the beautiful beverage coffee.

-HMS