Coffee is a story, and at Ernani we want to tell it well”
Just a few miles from Milan, in the small town of Desio, there is a place where the aroma of coffee is not just a familiar scent, but a promise: the promise of an authentic experience built on passion, research and transparency. This is where Torrefazione Ernani comes to life. We talked about it with Martina Mazzoleni, marketing manager and passionate voice of a company that has turned coffee into a labor of love.
Martina, could you briefly tell us the story of Torrefazione Ernani? Where did it begin and how has it evolved to this day?
Ernani as such was only founded in 2015, so today we are ten years old, even though the owners had already been in the industry since 1998. They were only distributors at that point, so they bought coffee from other roasters and resold it to cafés. Then in 2002 the Corso in Buenos Aires roastery came along too, but always reselling coffee from other roasters.
Then by chance we came into contact with quality coffee, we realized that we weren’t doing quality, and we decided to take that path. We asked our old roasters if they could create custom blends for us, but they said no because they had their own lines and they were going to stick with them. So we said, okay, let’s open our own roastery: that way we choose, we evaluate and we monitor the quality ourselves.
Torrefazione Ernani — What does coffee represent for you? Is there a philosophy or a value that guides your daily work?
For us coffee represents everything: it’s our job, what feeds us, our passion, what we love doing and sharing. In fact, our friends and family can’t stand us anymore, but that’s another story. The Ernani philosophy is, in truth, simply passion. We step outside the logic of those who do only specialty, and outside the logic of those who do purely commercial coffee — we’re somewhere in the middle. We do what we like. Always within the quality parameters defined internationally, of course. We always taste the coffees we select, and if we like them we put them into production, otherwise we don’t.
How do you choose the green coffees you buy? What criteria do you follow?
Until last year we selected green coffees through Italian importers who work well and only bring quality coffees into Italy, and don’t work for large retailers. They would send us samples of the coffees they had available, we would taste them, and we’d buy whatever we liked best.
Then I started traveling to the plantations in July of last year, so July 2024, and from there I began meeting in person the producers we were buying coffee from. For example, I just came back from Brazil in June and I selected some new Brazilian coffees we’d like to sell. The purchases still go through the Italian importer, who handles all the paperwork. But choosing the coffee directly at the plantation lets us select the product that best reflects our needs.
What roasting style do you use at Torrefazione Ernani? More on the light side, medium, or adapted to the type of coffee?
So, Ernani is by now synonymous with medium roast. Medium and not light, even though a light roast can further enhance certain aromatic notes, simply because we work in Italy, where the focus is primarily on espresso. So for both cafés and home customers a light roast doesn’t work, because it can’t deliver that body Italians are used to.
If we had been working in Switzerland, where filter coffee is very common, we would probably have chosen light roasting.
But in Italy that experiment isn’t viable yet. So we chose this roast level precisely for the quality it delivers in the cup, because it enhances the aromatic notes without making the coffee excessively bitter.
Can you walk us through how your roasting process works: artisanal? In batches? Automated?
So, our roasting process is completely artisanal, meaning that from step 1 to step 10 it’s all done by hand, every single step. We’re still small, we don’t have an enormous facility, so we do what we can with our own resources. We buy only micro lots of single origin coffee that we select directly.
That means uniform beans, of the same density, the same weight, the same size, and so on. That uniformity of the beans is important to deliver a quality roast.
Our roasting is single origin, which means we don’t blend before — we roast each individual micro lot separately. Then we let them rest and degas, again separately, and finally we build the blend in the proportions we’ve chosen. You also have to keep in mind that roasting isn’t always the same for every lot. For example, if we have a Sidamo and we want to enhance its acidity, we’ll roast it faster and at a few degrees less. The robustas, on the other hand, we roast on their specific curve to bring out more chocolate.
So in essence our roasting process is entirely artisanal.
In your view, what’s the state of coffee in Italy today? Is there greater awareness?
If I were to answer as Martina Mazzoleni and not as Ernani, coffee quality in Italy doesn’t really exist, except for a very few companies that have decided, as we did — and even better than we did — to take a particular path, especially when it comes to education. Because in my opinion, since in Italy there’s no coffee knowledge, if you produce quality but then you can’t communicate it, or you do it in a snobby or arrogant way, it makes no sense, because the customer shuts down and the conversation stops.
So the work we have to do now is to educate the consumer, because their palate isn’t trained for it.
It’s pointless to offer a specialty and then tell the customer they know nothing about coffee if they don’t appreciate it. In my opinion we should all take a step back, help each other build coffee culture, and only after we’ve built coffee culture really start pushing high quality. Unfortunately the consumer isn’t educated, isn’t aware at all, and there are still the big companies that obviously have to communicate and drive their sales. The consumer, unfortunately, trusts a multinational more than a small roastery. Plus, in Italy we’re convinced we have nothing to learn about coffee, and so there isn’t much curiosity.
But I do see that something is moving. It’s slow work. It was done with wine — we’ll do it with coffee too.
What advice would you give to a beginner who wants to start exploring the world of quality coffee?
So, I would suggest looking for something in the physical world. I’m saying this even though it’s against my own interest. As you know, I run an e-commerce site and I’m certainly happy to answer my online customers’ questions, but for those who are just starting out it would be important to find someone who physically explains things and lets you taste the coffee. I don’t know, a roastery or a skilled barista — a kind of tutor you can ask anything you need to.
Because at the beginning, if someone starts reading a label and sees altitude, aromatic profile, processing method and so on, they have absolutely no idea what those things mean. So having a real-world reference is important, especially at the start.
Do you have any special projects underway around training, education or sustainability?
On the sustainability side, we’re very attentive and we’re trying to reduce plastic to a minimum by replacing it with more eco-friendly materials. The issue is that, being relatively small, the minimum order quantities for this type of packaging are demanding, but we’re still working on finding a solution.
As for training, we have our academy, through which we have trained many professionals but also, honestly, many enthusiasts who took our courses purely for personal satisfaction. With the academy we move around based on requests, mainly in northern and central Italy.
Martina, what’s your favorite coffee?
The one I tasted recently in Rwanda definitely beat them all. There are some truly outstanding coffees there. I was traveling to visit the plantations and they had me taste several exceptional coffees. Unfortunately they’re very hard to find in Italy. But we always have to remember that coffee is a personal taste, and it changes over time. There is no perfect coffee — there’s only the one you like in a given moment, depending on your palate.
From Martina’s words emerges an authentic, concrete and passionate vision of coffee, one that rejects extremism to give value back to quality made with competence, honesty and taste. Torrefazione Ernani moves consistently along this path, where every choice — from the bean to the cup — is guided by awareness and a desire to grow. A reality that proves it is possible to combine craftsmanship, product culture and an educational spirit, without ever losing sight of what really matters: the pleasure of a good cup of coffee.
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To explore the topic of Torrefazione Ernani further we recommend the standards published by the Specialty Coffee Association and the market data on Coffee roasting on Wikipedia. If you’d like to keep reading on nerocaliente, take a look at Juta Caffè Specialty.
