Brescia is north of Milan and famous for two things: steel and stubbornness. Both are useful when you are making a grinder by hand.
Burrs, not blades
A blade chops the bean. A burr asks the bean a question. The Brescia burr asks more carefully than most — six degrees of relief, hand-lapped, finished with a cloth that has seen the inside of more espressos than any human alive.
The first month we used it, our extraction times dropped by four seconds and our regulars said our coffee tasted ‘nicer’ without knowing why. The second month, two of them changed their order. By month three, the queue had quietly lengthened.
“We did not advertise the new grinder. The cup did the talking.”
We still send the burrs back to Brescia every two years to be re-lapped. They come home in a wooden box with a hand-written note. The dog has retired.
