Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a surprising coffee from Italy, San Giusto Caffé Blu. Let’s dive right in!
Purchase directly from San Giusto (limited countries) for 18 Euro/1kg
In USA purchase for $15/250g (8.8oz) or $24/500g (17.6oz)
SAN GIUSTO CAFFÉ BLU
San Giusto Caffé Blu is a coffee that was sent to me by Coffee In Italia, a US distributor of a bunch of Italian coffee brands. I love this website because it’s the closest thing to walking in the aisles of an Italian grocery store and seeing the coffee section! Coffee In Italia carries whole bean coffee as well as the classic vacuum packs of pre-ground coffee, which you could use with a pressurized portafilter or, better yet, to make strong coffee with a moka pot (also purchaseable from Coffee In Italia). Coffee In Italia also carries a selection of cups and spoons and other accessories, making it a nice shop to bookmark if you’re an Italophile who’s into coffee!
When Adrianna sent me this selection from San Giusto Caffé, I had no idea what to expect. Most of my experience with Italian coffee is Roman cafe culture from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s (and it hasn’t changed a lot, as far as I have been able to tell on more recent trips!) and cans of Lavazza, Illy, etc when I was very early in my home espresso journey 20 years ago. San Giusto Caffé is a roastery (torrefazione) located outside of Trieste, Italy. For a little geography lesson, Italy wraps a surprising distance around the northern part of the Adriatic Sea, called the Gulf of Trieste, and there is a thin strip of Italy bordered by Slovenia to its east. If you went south along the coast out of Trieste, you’d be in Slovenia for a little while, then you’d hit the coast of Croatia, too. When I lived in Italy, I was never made it to visit this part of Italy, but it looks beautiful, like the rest of the coast of the Mediterranean!
San Giusto Caffé has been roasting coffee in Trieste since 1949 and Trieste has a history in coffee dating back over 300 years! They’re named after the patron saint of Trieste, who was martyred for being a Christian in 293. San Giusto does not sell their products in supermarkets, but is rather direct order in most of Europe from their website. In the USA, you can buy this coffee from Coffee In Italia. In fact, San Giusto’s website says most of their coffee is exported. According to their website, the Blu blend is, “Sweet, delicate and extraordinarily aromatic. A blend of the highest quality Arabica coffee from Brazil, Central America and Ethiopia. Light body, fruity and floral notes, with a marked acidity. It is a blend with low caffeine content, characteristic of Arabica coffees.”
So, this is a 100% Arabica blend with none of the robusta that Italian roasters tend to like to add to their coffee. San Giusto’s Bar blend and Rosso blend do contain Robusta and sounds like based on description, they may be roasted darker and more traditionally. I was surprised to find that the Blu blend is a medium roast with no hints of oil on the beans, something I’m mostly unaccustomed to for Italian beans, but hopefully part of a trend there. Nothing against dark roasts, but at a certain point, the roast becomes about, well, the roast, and not the quality or characteristics of the coffee, which are highlighted with lighter roasting.
Using my Roast Vision device from Espresso Vision, this coffee measures at 19, which is “medium” on the Roast Vision scale and translates to a 76 Agtron number. The Roast Vision measures the color of roasted coffee and places it on a scale from 0-35, with higher numbers being lighter roasts. 19 is on the light side of the medium range. One concern I always have with coffee roasted in another country is just how long it takes to get the coffee to its destination. I could not find any roast date on my bag, but I did notice on the little label on the back side of the bag it said there is a date on the top of the bag, and I wonder if I missed it when I cut the top off the bag to open it. I know there are some people who believe coffee needs to be as fresh as possible to be fully enjoyed, but this is not the case, especially for espresso, which generally does well with 10-14 or more days resting before using it in an espresso machine. This allows carbon dioxide to off-gas from the roasted beans, which is a benefit both for how it pulls in the espresso machine and for taste reasons. I’m generally OK with coffees that are 4, even 5 weeks off-roast, most of the time.
I found my bag of Blu to seem reasonably fresh and it pulled as expected. I worked with a range of shot styles with this coffee from ristretto style shots (1:1 ratio, so in other words, starting with, say, 18g of coffee and aiming for around 18g in the cup after 25-30 seconds of extraction on the machine) to normale shots (1:2 ratio, so going for about twice the weight of coffee in the cup compared to the weight of grounds in the portafilter) and I defintiely liked the higher ratios better. One of my shots from my notes used 19g in the portafilter and I pulled 23.9g in 30 seconds. This had heavy body and lots of dark chocolate with a hint of orange in the acidity, but it was also noticeably salty, a downside of this type of extraction. The shots I preferred were 1:2 or even a little higher in their ratio, for example, one was 19g in, 45.8g out in 26 seconds, which I was skeptical of, but tasted great. Here I got a lot of balance, no saltiness, lots of chocolate, hints of baking spices and a crusty bread note in the finish and aftertaste I really enjoyed. There was a nuttiness to these shots, too and this would be an excellent coffee to pair with milk in lattes, macchiatos, cortados, etc. I don’t drink dairy so I don’t have the means to steam it and prepare these kinds of drinks here at World Domination HQ, but based on its flavors, I can’t imagine Blu being anything short of excellent in these drinks, with loads of complementary sweetness for the milk.
I enjoyed San Giusto’s Blu blend very much. It’s an easy-drinking, sweet, chocolate and nut-forward coffee and I hope it represents a changing tide among Italian roasters toward lighter roasting, or at least offering lighter roasts for those customers who want them. It’s an amazing feat that you can walk into pretty much any restaurant or coffee bar in the country and get more or less the same shot of espresso, but that’s a double-edged sword, too. I’d like to see Italian roasters and cafes embracing their own style and flavor profiles and I think this San Giusto Blu represents a move toward that future!