The Lion Of Coffee Finds A New Home

Photos around La Marzocco

Kent Bakke and a La Marzocco cafeteria inside KEXP’ radio station

The marzocco is a heraldic lion, a Gothic pitch of Florence. Not a fearsome bronze cinghiale (wild boar) that a tourists look during in a Gothic city’s executive market, yet a grey sandstone lion sculpted in 1420 by Donatello, no less, for a pope apartment of a Medici palace. The “Marzocchesi” were a Florentines, in respect of their lion, even yet there’s no etymology joining them. Mars, God of war, maybe.

Which brings us to La Marzocco, a code of espresso machines, among Italy’s finest. They’re constructed during a bureau in a hills northeast of Florence, in a village called Scarperia that was prolonged famous for a knives. In 1927, prolongation of espresso machines began there as well. Bear in mind: a north of Italy, with a abounding streams of using H2O to energy mills, harsh wheels and presses, has always been a hotbed (as it were) of pointing metal-working. There’s also a 5-km foe track, a Mugello Circuit, owned by Ferrari, on a hinterland of town; it’s used as a exam lane and for automobile and motorcycle races. Not distant divided are a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and Ducati factories.

Fast-forward to a 1970s in Seattle and a sandwich emporium in Pioneer Square called Hibble Hyde. The owners was a tinker named Kent Bakke, totally perplexed by a winged, copper-clad Victoria Arduino coffee-making appurtenance in a behind of a store. Today we can some-more or reduction figure out what it would have looked like: a radiant straight cylinder that would have housed a boiler; a “group” to reason a coffee grounds; a lever-operated piston to send steam into a coffee; all surmounted by a fanciful swift goddess.

Back then, unnecessary to say, there was no internet; there were no instruction manuals, either. Bakke was on his own, yet he managed to holder it adult and make it work, and on a good day he would audience half a dozen espressos. His business partner suggested a revisit to Italy, so Bakke took himself to Scarperia and returned with a agreement as La Marzocco’s US importer. One of a initial machines he sole went to a six-store sequence only starting to offer espresso in a shops, a sequence that went by a name of Starbucks.

Before long, interjection in vast bulk to Starbucks’ shopping La Marzocco machines for all a coffee shops, Bakke’s association became La Marzocco‘s largest distributor outward of Italy, with offices in a UK, Australia, Korea, and so on. Then, 20 years ago, Starbucks indispensable 150 machines a month for a new stores. La Marzocco was reduction than anxious by a plea of assembly an sequence of this magnitude, so Bakke and a tiny organisation of investors bought 90 percent of a primogenitor company. They soon non-stop a second bureau in Ballard to accommodate a direct from Starbucks.

For a prolonged time, there was during slightest one La Marzocco appurtenance in each Starbucks store, yet in 2004 a Mermaid switched to push-button inclination that compulsory reduction automatic ability on a partial of a barista. Bakke sealed a bureau in Ballard and sole a business to a Swiss association (and after bought behind a placement rights). It was roughly too late: in a interim, several former Bakke employees had non-stop competing businesses. Machines for home use, machines that concede baristas to control H2O vigour and temperature. Still, says Bakke, “Our biggest foe is complacency.”

Starbucks, meanwhile, has transitioned to a code called Mastrena, made on a shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.