by HÉLÈNA KATZ

Coffee must percolate in the veins of Piccolo brothers Vince, Michael and Sammy. Nine years ago, determined to serve the best coffee in Vancouver, they opened their first Caffé Artigiano. They brought quality specialty coffee to a population eager for a taste of something better, and now business is brewing at a dozen locations under new owner Willi Mounser.

Earlier this year, Sammy, one of Canada’s top baristas of the decade, captured second place at the World Barista Championships. Michael has made roasting coffee his passion, and when he and Vince started 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters five years ago, they really got the city’s coffee drinkers buzzing.

The parallel part refers to the latitude and the attitude that nurtures a symbiotic relationship between the bean and the craft. “A great barista is somebody who actually drinks coffee and understands what needs to be done to improve the quality of the coffee,” Vince says. “Without baristas, roasters would never know how to improve what they are roasting.”

Last year, Vince and Michael opened their first 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters Café on West 4th Avenue in the sophisticated Kitsilano neighbourhood. “It was a great way for us to showcase what we do at our roastery,” Vince explains. “Whether it’s espresso or single-origin, we want coffee drinkers to really enjoy something excellent.”

In that pursuit of uncompromising excellence, the 49th Parallel team cups coffee production roasts every single day. “We go one cup at a time and analyze to make it the best it can be.” The result is so highly regarded that the company has only a single salesperson for all of North America and, as Vince explains, “Ninety-nine percent of our clients are just people who call us and know about our top quality coffee.”

The café’s recipe for success means sourcing the very best roasted coffee, providing baristas with outstanding equipment so they can be consistent, hiring for knowledge and capability, and ensuring staff are fully trained to produce the very best coffee every time. Keeping it simple and doing it right was the way his mother taught the brothers as she drew upon her experience growing up in Italy.

“My mother used to walk to the market everyday, buy everything fresh and cook it,” Vince says. “In Italian culture, food is really important and people are very focused on how things taste. That made me ask why coffee can taste bitter and terrible at times and other times can be astonishingly good. Understanding how to get to really great-tasting coffee involves sitting back and analyzing what you are doing on many different levels.”

The first ones who did that in Vancouver little more than a decade ago were the premium coffee pioneers, and competition has upped the ante and the public’s expectations for quality. “Once the ball got rolling, Vancouver became a coffee-conscious place, the same way that competition feeds fine dining and everybody wants to be better than their competitor,” he observes.

To complement its espresso and single-origin coffees, 49th Parallel serves baked goods and chocolate at its Kitsilano café. It buys coffee directly from growers and also partners with importers. “A lot of times your importer is the person that introduced you to that farmer, and that loyalty counts. I think the farmer should make more money than the fair trade price, and I think the people who are importing and taking a risk on that import should be compensated as well.”

Vince believes the very best coffees in the world are high-grown varietals from Ethiopia and Kenya, which deliver sparkling acidity and delectable sweetness. “When coffee is good, you should be able to taste the farm in it, like you can with a fine pinot noir wine.”