Sipping coffee…you think about:

How people live in the faraway places where the plant which produces coffee grows? Roberto Ricci was exactly thinking about that while he was sipping a coffee from Central America. In 2001, together with the initiative to buy fairtrade coffee, Roberto took the decision to make a booklet to inform clients about the life of coffee. The proceeds from the sale of the pleasant booklet “Io sono caffè / I am coffee” was entirely destined to the Junta Monsenor Romero, a co-op of coffee farmers in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. One of the projects of the co-op was to build an IT centre; another one was to install a device to dry coffee indoor, very useful to process coffee during very damp periods. The help given by the proceeds from the sale of the Sant’Eustachio booklet made these two projects true.

Sipping coffee…you think about:

Why Italians wanted to know more about the history of coffee in Brazil?
Italian immigration to Brazil between 1800 and 1900 was an important fact for the development of the production and the trade of coffee in the world. Sant’Eustachio Il Caffè wanted to tell this story and in 2004 thought up and sponsored the multimedia exhibition CafesEspresso, held in Rome at Palazzo Pamphilj, in Piazza Navona, which houses the Brazilian Embassy. Historical findings gathered in Brazil and Italy helped to report the history of the growth, selection, export, roast, extraction and consumption of coffee; by one side, the findings told the story of Brazil, the main coffee producer of the world, and, from the other side, Italy which has the best extraction technology, the espresso.

Sipping coffee…you think about:

A lot of people do not know what is behind (and around) a cup of coffee. This is the reason why Roberto Ricci of Sant’Eustachio Il Caffè cooperates with the World Shops - Botteghe del Mondo of Rome, shops of fairtrade products, making trainings and workshops on fair-trading. For the trainings he prepared a Power Point presentation with all the information about the history and cultivation of coffee. The story, which begins with the medical use of coffee before the 10th century, is enriched with pictures of the plantations, the processing and the farmers. The trainings finish with the cupping of different coffees from all over the world, trying to individuate their most important sensory characteristics: the bitterness, the acidity and the sweetness.