The starting point

Hi there, welcome to my journal. The idea is to share interesting information about the coffee world in this blog which hopefully you find insightful.

We will cover topics concerning my own experience with coffee roasting, tips for brewing your infusion and taking the best out of each bean, nice coffee shops around the Globe… and much more! Let´s make this a two-way conversation. 

For this first article, allow me to introduce a bit of history and rational behind this beautiful project that started some time ago. Gufo Nero is a micro coffee roaster born to merge many different ingredients with the aim to obtain and share a recipe full of passion, dedication, social responsibility and craftmanship with you. 

Reviewing a bit my own life, I can tell you that I fell for coffee around 15 years ago in my beloved Argentina, not only for its aroma and flavour but also for the whole experience of having a moment of peace with myself in the always-in-a-rush cosmopolitan Buenos Aires city. In addition, for an Argentine, “Tomamos un cafecito?” (sic: “Shall we go for a coffee?”) is something beyond the act of drinking: it means having a (long) moment dedicated for friendship, gossip, joy, business, or even for having a serious talk. So, for me, coffee started having both a social and a personal meaning, performing as a bridge to a lot of things. 

Moving ahead in the life calendar, 2015 arrived… and Germany welcomed me with open arms to live in Nürnberg ever since. Amongst many benefits, this relocation experience allowed me to continue with my Marketing profession and gave me in parallel the chance to deepen my strong feelings for this infusion by enjoying beautiful local coffee shops and by being geographically in the center of Europe. It is rhetorical, then, that the easy access to this wonderful specialty coffee world has been the stairway to heaven for me. 

Nürnberg´s strategic location was not only a historical fact in the development of Bavaria but was crucial for me as well: Italy. This has been a blessing every time I wanted to go to my homeland without the need to travel more than 17 hours by plane, and I had this just a few steps away from me. My family is half Spanish and half Italian rooted, so you can imagine the flashbacks I have every time I am around them here on every coffee shop or restaurant. 

To be honest, at this point, I did not even bother myself to question anything nor to run away from coffee but to embrace it to the fullest. I simply enjoyed it and allowed myself to flow with it. Connecting some dots, as coffee played a crucial role in human history (we can talk about this in other posts for sure; it is super interesting), it did to me as an individual. Even more if I mention the fact I met my wife through it! With all these insights, plus the fact I am a very restless and curious, adventurous person, I felt in the need to do something tangible with it so, back in 2018, I went to Rome for a full week to do a barista certification course, which was a clear re-confirmation for my love for coffee. It was a gift to have spent five full days learning, practicing and exchanging information with people around the world. At that point of time I was mainly interested into the facing-the-consumer side of the supply chain, and actually skipping all roasting sections of every coffee book or magazine I was reading. Don´t ask me why… neither I know the exact reason, but I think was a matter of focusing on one-step-at-a-time in this enormous world. What I can truly affirm is that the more you learn, the more you realize you did not have all information; and that is the beauty of the coffee world: it is a vast ocean of data, art, science… and also details!!! It is mind blowing how very small details affect the end-result towards one or other direction, and this applies not only to brewing the infusion but also to roast the coffee and to seed & harvest it.    

So, once I got to know a few things concerning the brewing framework (I repeat: I continue learning on a daily basis) naturally and unconsciously I started to be interested in going back into the supply chain, to pay more attention to the roasting process as a way to also understand where all starts and how it influences the drink we enjoy (or not) in the cup. It was exactly opening a door to a completely new level of information. I was not only fascinated by the chemical changes during the roasting action itself, but also by getting to know about drum or air roasters features, if it is better to use electricity of gas as a medium, without forgetting about the multiple variables a roaster needs to task simultaneously to achieve a nice result, and also about the coffee bush in terms of biology and how the geography, topography and climate conditions inputs it to deliver a cherry with certain potential flavours and aromas. 

I could definitely continue writing endlessly about this topic simply because I love it and because the amount of information is huge, so never gets boring. We will of course dive deeper into each one of these topics in future posts, but I wanted to share with you my relationship with coffee and my path (very topline) until today and how I wanted to be part of influencing the cup I drink. And believe me: every time I roast a coffee, I feel a nice connection with the country and the farmers involved in making that product a reality; that is my aim with Guro Nero: to share with you the love & passion each person put into that product you enjoy with every sip, and to support all the families involved in that. And if I can achieve that with tasty flavours and beautiful aromas, the mission is accomplished.