Hey, coffee lovers. You all know what Italians mean by saying “caffe'”, mostly called “espresso” in other countries. And you all know Italians are damn good in making it. At least, they claim to be.
Well… Statistically speaking, there is a rule of 80%, the Pareto principle. Imagine your city and all the coffee shops around. Let’s consider there are a hundred for commodity. According to Pareto, 80 coffee shops suck, and the other 20 are making coffee. But this is in your city!
Now imagine an Italian town, with a hundred bars along one street. Yeah, exaggerated, but there are much, much more coffee shops in an average Italian town. Let’s make it a 1000 all over the town. 800 of them suck, and 200 are those damn good. It means, that the probability to get a good coffee in Italy seems higher (??). You will say that the probability of getting bad coffee increased accordingly! Right.
But think about the city again. If you want to have a good cup of espresso, you will remember 1, 2…maybe 3 favourite places. That’s it! If you are in Italy, you don’t stop counting, you choose the best for now place and never bother to continue. Thus, your choice is bigger and you feel like being in coffee paradise, don’t you.
I worked as a barman almost 10 years ago and was interested in coffee brewing. So I could distinguish between good and bad long before I came to Italy. When I faced this choice of thousands of coffee shops, I started sort of noticing the 1/5 relation. No surprise.
Being around people who went mad for coffee a couple of generations before you doesn’t change the math. I heard one woman saying that the taste of coffee differs if you make it on a rainy day. A day after I assisted in making coffee using carbonated water, with the man saying: “I know it’s not the best, but it’s OK”.
The moral – 80% of coffee in the world sucks!
But it’s OK 🙂
Foreign Guy 