Notas del episodio
Illy Ferenc was born in Temesvár in the Austro Hungarian Empire, a city now called Timișoara in Romania. Conscripted into the Austro Hungarian army in World War I, he was left without a homeland when the empire dissolved and the Treaty of Trianon redrew the map, so he stayed with his sister in Trieste, newly under Italian rule. As Francesco Illy he founded a business there in 1933 trading cocoa and coffee, then dropped cocoa. In 1935 he built the Illetta, a machine that used compressed air rather than steam to push water just below boiling through the grounds, and it is considered the predecessor of modern automatic espresso machines.
He also packed roasted coffee in cans with the air replaced by pressurized nitrogen, so it could travel beyond Trieste without going stale. His son Ernesto Illy, a chemist who lived from 1925 to 2008, built a research lab, partnered with universities, and treated coffee's more than a thousand compounds as a science. The third generation, led by chairman Andrea Illy with Anna, Francesco, and Riccardo, bought 100% Arabica directly from Brazil, Colombia, India, Africa, and Central America, and taught growers for free.
- Steam scorches the grounds and draws out bitter tannins, while pressurized water near 90 degrees Celsius emulsifies oils into crema.
- The Ernesto Illy Trieste Science Prize, run from 2004 to 2012 with the World Academy of Sciences, honored scientists from the developing world.
- The University of Coffee, founded in 1999 in Naples, now has 27 branches, and its Brazil course runs 360 hours.
- Illy buys 10 to 30% of trained growers' crops at a premium with no exclusive contract.
- The Illy Art Collection, begun in 1992, featured cups by Rauschenberg, Koons, Yoko Ono, David Byrne, and Francis Ford Coppola.