Gaggia History

Espresso as expression: of taste, of sensibility, of tradition. Espresso as refined technique, as knowledge handed down through generations as inimitable pleasure. This is Gaggia’s approach to coffee A company’s story, the espresso story

GAGGIA CREATES THE TRUE ESPRESSO: THE ESPRESSO MACHINE IN NAME AND IN FACT There are stories that, before the war, Giovanni Achille Gaggia, a bar owner in Milan, born in 1895 in Milan, was experimenting with screw-type pistons to make coffee and that after the war he tried the lever piston and it worked. Another story goes that Gaggia actually possessed a model of the screw piston and could show it to people. Yet a third story says that Rosetta Scorza, the wife of an inventor, came to Gaggia with an idea for a new machine. The idea was a little primitive and when the inventor died, his wife sold it to Gaggia for a thousand Lira (a large sum of money in those days). Gaggia made some improvements and the true espresso machine as we know it was invented. The facts almost fit in with these stories

Achille Gaggia, set himself up in its coffee bar, where he became a dedicated barman. He was not satisfied with the flavour of coffee coming from his existing machine, which scalded the coffee and made it bitter. Perhaps the coffee was over-roasted and burnt to compensate for the poor extraction. The ingenious barman met Rosetta Scorza. Rosetta Scorza of Milan was married to Sr. Cremonese who was a technician in a coffee grinder factory. He made tests to see if the coffee was ground evenly and was responsible for introducing the cone mill to Italy in the 1930s. He patented the idea of a screw piston, which forced the water through the coffee. Cremonese died and Rosetta Scorza was left with a patent. The story continues that Rosetta Scorza tried to get existing manufacturers to use her invention but they were not interested. It is possible that she showed Gaggia the patent, because he lodged a patent application for a piston group, in 1938. read more: http://www.moretto.ro/gaggia-history/