Collection: Mokalux

A family coffee roastery in Calenzano, on the Florentine plain, opened by Pio Piazzesi in 1920. Maurizio Piazzesi runs it today — he is the one who roasts — alongside his daughter Alice.

Almost nobody in Italy still roasts coffee over a wood fire. Here they do, and the wood is oak: it goes into the roaster's stove, not under the drum, and the heat climbs from one hundred to two hundred and ten degrees within twenty minutes, gradually. That curve is the craft: climb too fast and you burn the outside and leave the inside raw, climb too slowly and you cook the bean without developing it.

Next to the wood fire there is new machinery, and that is no contradiction: the tool gets updated, the decision about when to stop the fire does not. Every lot of green coffee has a different personality, and the blend is retuned each time so that the packet bought in March tastes like the one bought in November.