First coffee tasting in Fiesole for the Board of Experts

The Board of Experts of the Slow Food Coffee Coalition is a group made up of some of the top Italian and international Coffee Experts! 

This group of coffee connoisseurs met at La Marzocco Espresso Coffee Academy in Fiesole (Florence) to taste and evaluate varieties selected by Slow Food and grown by communities from Cuba, Ethiopia, Honduras (Café resiliente el Paraíso), Rio Colorado, and Doña Ana, India (Nilgirs Coffee), Malawi (Chakaka Coffee Growers)  Mexico (Bosque, Niebla y Caffè Xalapa/), Peru, (La Chacra D’dago), and Tanzania. 

Some of the Slow Food Communities that supplied the coffees for the tasting (Honduras, India, and Malawi) have already adhered to the SFCC Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) initiative, while others (Cuba, Ethiopia, Peru, and Tanzania) are at an early stage on the path towards this innovative and democratic form of certification.

PGS is an alternative model of certification in which producers and other stakeholders decide together on a set of common standards, norms, and procedures, share a coordinating body, adopt a logo and establish penalties for any failure to comply with the rules.

The Slow Food Coffee Coalition believes that there isn’t a perfect certification system, but it is possible to establish a model based on trust and collaboration, which does not financially burden producers. The purpose of this first meeting was to consolidate the panel of tasters of the Slow Food Coffee Coalition and to calibrate the evaluation criteria of PGS  concerning the sensory evaluation of coffee.

The Coalition wants to promote beans of high organoleptic quality, that are not necessarily specialty coffees, but a good product where quality encompasses the environmental and social value, therefore the respect of local biodiversity and the work of farmers