What lead to your research project: 'The Cappuccino Conquests. A Transnational History of Italian Coffee' ?
I'm a historian of modern Italy and learned to love Italian -style coffee when I first began visiting the country in the mid-1980s: in fact it's fair to say that I learned Italian by hanging out in bars and talking to the barista and customers. I got fascinated by the public culture of these places and my doctoral dissertation and subsequent publications have mostly dealt with small shopkeepers and bar proprietors in Italy.
Then when I was teaching in London in the mid-90s, the first coffee shops began appearing and I would often take my students to one in order to sample Italian coffee at the end of a course. Costa coffee at Euston station was a particular favourite which I often visited on my way home. I knew that Costa had been founded by a pair of Anglo-Italian brothers and many of the coffee shops were trying to brand themselves as Italian even if the beverages and format they used were more borrowed from the US model. It occurred to me that we were literally seeing a revolution in British beverage habits in our times and that someone should try and put this into a historical context. In particular, I wanted to analyse the transnational element of this - the interchanges (both literally and in terms of branding and image) between Italy, the US and the UK. So when the UK research funding councils set up a programme to study Cultures of Consumption, I applied for a grant and The Cappuccino Conquests (http://www.cappuccinoconquests.org.uk/) research project was born.
With this project, who was your co-collaborator on the project ?
The project application included provision for a research assistant to work in Italy, and I nominated Dr. Claudia Baldoli to fill that role. I examined Claudia's doctorate on the Italian community in the UK during the Fascist period at the London School of Economics and knew she would be a good person to work with, partly because of her historical and language capabilities, mostly because of her self-motivation and enthusiasm. After working in Italy for a year, Claudia has now joined me at the University of Hertfordshire where we continue to collaborate together.
An additional advantage of appointing Claudia was that she is from Brescia, which is also the headquarters of the Italian Espresso National Institute who have given us a lot of assistance with the project and sit on our Advisory Board. Other members of the board include Colin Smith, President of the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe, Edward Bramah of the Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum, Adrian Maddox, the founder of the Classic Cafes website, and the Italian Chamber of Commerce in London.
Why did you pick Cappuccino as your research project?
The project is about all forms of espresso-based beverages which, for convenience, we have called ‘Italian coffee'. I called the project The Cappuccino Conquests precisely to make the point that while espresso remains the dominant drink in Italy, in most other markets (notably Northern Europe, North America and Australasia) it has always been the larger milky drinks such as cappuccino and, more recently, latte that have driven the spread of Italian coffee. This basic difference between the Italian and overseas markets has conditioned a great deal of the history of Italian coffee.
Describe for our readers, how you would define the social trends of the consumption of Italian Coffee in the UK ?
Historically speaking, there have been three main phases in the history of Italian Coffee in the UK. The first from the mid-1950s to early 1960s saw a boom in coffee bars that spread out rapidly from London's West End to the rest of the country. At this point coffee was a relatively unknown beverage in comparison to tea, and in many ways coffee bars featuring the newly arrived Gaggia machines were a youth phenomena offering teenagers who were too young to drink alcohol a place to hang out in the evenings, listen or dance to music and, in a sense rebel against their parents' tastes by drinking coffee as opposed to tea (or beer). Frankly however the quality of the espresso (most of which was supplied by the Kenyan Coffee Company aka Kenco) is unlikely to have mattered that much to these consumers, and the connection with Italy was not that strong. Anglo-Italian cafés tended to be used by manual workers who overwhelmingly demanded tea. It wasn't until the 70s and 80s that they began to use espresso as a way of expressing their Italianess, just as the Italian restaurant chains would serve cappuccinos at the end of a meal to reinforce their ethnic ‘authenticity' even though you would never catch an Italian ordering a cappuccino after a meal.
The big difference with the current boom in coffee shops is that consumers are now much more attracted to the quality of the coffee, even though they are not that aware of how this is obtained. In that sense the success of espresso-based beverages today derives partly from their taste. Because the British associated these with Italy many of the most successful chains try to incorporate ‘Italianess' into their branding, even if they actually don't have much connection to Italy. Caffé Nero, the third largest operator in the UK and the most profitable, is a good example. Some chains serve blends that are close to the classic Italian espresso (Costa, for example) while others use more robust (and Robusta) blends to make sure the coffee stands up to the amounts of milk that tend to be added to it. However, it's important to remember that there are many other elements that combine to explain the boom in coffee shops in the UK.
What is coffee's role in today's society?
In a way the best answer to that is to say I've spent the last two hours in my local coffee shop answering your questions without anyone looking to throw me out - something that would have been very unlikely had I gone into a British café 10 years ago. Coffee shops in the UK, as elsewhere, are as much about selling time as they are about coffee. Arguably the coffee is the price you pay for using the space of the shop to relax, entertain, hold meetings, work, read the papers or listen to music. The British are particularly fond of consuming their beverages within the coffee shop - takeaway trade here is much lower than in the US, especially outside London, while the average time customers spend in the shop is now well over half an hour.
That said the coffee is still an important part of the experience. Although sales of espresso machines and espresso grade coffees for the domestic consumption have increased substantially this is from a very low base and the home market is still dominated by instant coffee. One of the problems for tea in the drink-out market is that most consumers feel they can make the product just as well at home - that's not true for Italian style coffee and so that creates a perceived value for the product that makes it seem like an affordable luxury, thus justifying the price.
Is there anything you would like to share with our readers about the future of your Cappuccino Conquests project?
Our project is very much dependent on people sharing their experiences and observations with us. We've put up a website at http://www.cappuccinoconquests.org.uk/ and would be very keen to get feedback and responses to this. We'd love to hear from readers who can tell us something about their experience of the history and spread of Italian coffee through the globe. For example it would be very interesting to hear from readers who participated in the first boom of the 50s and 60s, or who could tell us about the development of speciality coffee and the spread of espresso in their countries. Please use my email j.2.morris@herts.ac.uk to get in touch.
The ultimate aim of the project is to produce a book and hold an exhibition on this topic in London. In the interim we have been giving talks on the work as it progresses, as well as publishing articles which you can download from the website. I'll be talking about the project at the World Speciality Coffee Conference in Berne in May, and we will be giving a public presentation of our work at the Italian Cultural Institute in London on the evening of 17 November. It would be great to meet some of your readers there.
POSTED: Thursday, March 16, 2006