ALBIS CAFFETTERIA, VIA DEI CONCIATORI 23, 00154 ROMA

Rating: Poor, north Italian roasted coffee

I was walking around the south side of the Commonwealth Cemetery near Piramide when I spied a café called simply ‘Caffetteria’ But it’s receipt it gives as Albis Caffetteria, so that’s what’ll be here. I walked by it and it had a ‘closed’ sign on it… but there were still folk inside. So I said, what the hell… and walked in. When I did, it was of course open. Then a regular walked in and said, what’s with the sign? And the barista said oh.. it’s one of the school kids who must’ve did it. Well.. I think they did it for a point…. The café is small, has tobacco and other things a convenience store has, and at the end a machine kicking out the Java. It’s got a weird purple, light blue vinyl plastic and metal covered interior that reminds me of Tron or something of the like. My photo didn’t capture it.

This is what I got served:

Presentation: A nice drip on the interior, fun that the saucer was light blue. The spoon was welcomingly bland. I liked it, and quite used.

Temperature of Cup: Warm but not terribly warm.

Quantity: Short shot in this small barrel shaped cup.

Temperature: Good, somewhat lukewarm actually.

Volume/Consistency: Thin, watery, runny, no thickness nor volume to the brew.

Crema: Dark, grainy, persistent. Only over-extracted by a one or two second margin. It was cakey and then started to thin out immediately.

Odor: Yes, it was present, was it pleasing? Nope, it was a dark-charred coffee smell.

Taste: Astringent, sharp, punch in the mouth. Made my mouth tingle and I never like that. Feels like medicine or something. Then this opened up to a metallic taste in m mouth. Worse for me, in my opinion. I decided to put this fish back in the stream and not finish it.

Overall: Yeah, not worth the bother. I let it go. And maybe this is why somebody turned the ‘open’ sign over and put on ‘closed’ when they left the bar, the coffee…

The setup: They had a trustworthy Faema, the grinder was a Mazzer that is the centerpiece of lots of third-wave cafes in the US and abrod, and the coffee well… that was the low point, in my opinion. It was MokaSirs Caffè, this is a north-Italian Roaster that does uber dark roasts… a la Starbucks in the early 2000s…