The team of Rancilio Group Portugal looks forward to seeing you at the LX Factory from 22 to 24 March
Expectations are running high for the first edition of the Lisbon Coffee Fest which, from 22 to 24 March, will be animating the LX Factory, the symbolic venue of the former industrial area of Alcantara. Rancilio Group will be there with two stands, one dedicated to Rancilio Specialty with the new RS1 model and another designed to promote Next, the top of the line Egro-branded fully automatic coffee machine. In Portugal, roasted coffee still dominates the market and the first Coffee Fest, which will be held in Lisbon, is just the latest chapter of a story that began centuries ago and will always belong to Portuguese culture. Coffee shops exist and have always existed in Portugal, both in rural areas and in large city centres. In Lisbon’s Chado district, located between the Barrio Aito and the Baixa, there is a storied venue that has been serving coffee for more than one hundred years. Once it was the only place you could go to enjoy an authentic Brazilian coffee, that of Minas Gerais. Marvellously Art Deco, it was a place for social gatherings where intellectuals and artists spent their free time in the last century. It was also one of the favourite coffee shops of poet Fernando Pessoa, who is still commemorated today, outside the venue, by a bronze statue which portrays him seated at a bistro table with his legs crossed. The look in his eyes is typically apprehensive and, judging from his expression, he seems to be on the point of saying that this particular coffee shop was not his favourite one at all, and that the whole story is nothing but a marketing ploy. If Pessoa could get up from that table today, he would choose to do so on the 22 March. He would rapidly make off in the direction of the LX Factory to go and study the colourful young Speciality Coffee tribe and soak up the atmosphere of the Lisbon Coffee Fest. He could stop and sip an espresso coffee on the Rancilio Specialty stand and find out how the quality of his beloved Minas Gerais coffee can be enhanced thanks to the Temperature Profiling technology of the RS1. He would be bewildered by the plethora of new tastes and aromas unlike those of the coffee shops he is familiar with because, thanks to the RS1, it is possible to create various extraction profiles from the same coffee by varying the water temperature during the extraction phase. He could certainly taste several cups of coffee created with different profiles in his search for perfection, that special coffee which recalls the pleasures of times gone by. Together with the team of Rancilio Group Portugal, he could also reconstruct, taste after taste, the flavour of a particular coffee which inspired him to write such memorable verses. The verses which are still the pillars of twentieth century Portuguese literature today. Our friend Pessoa would also have the time to marvel at the Egro fully automatic coffee machines and to make himself an espresso coffee drink, a creamy cold latte or a hot chocolate. Then he could return to his table in Rua Garrett and comment on the coffees he has tasted on the Egro stand at the Lisbon Coffee Festival, using the same term he coined to promote the launch of Coca-Cola in Portugal: “Primeiroestranha-se, depoisentranha-se”.
Lisbon Coffee Fest
22-24 March
XL Factory – Lisbon
Rancilio Specialty – stand G2
Egro – stand P5
