Florence, May 22nd, 2024 – La Marzocco, a leading Italian manufacturer of premium espresso machines since 1927, is proud to announce the opening of the University of California Davis Coffee Center with La Marzocco’s support. The UC Davis Coffee Center is the first academic research and teaching facility in the U.S. entirely dedicated to studying coffee, and La Marzocco is excited to help make its brewing lab possible.

“We are inspired by the UC Davis Coffee center, its purpose, the creative students and its faculty. A mutual collaboration with coffee that we believe will be a benefit to all of us within the coffee sector,” says Kent Bakke, La Marzocco partner. “We are honored to be a part of this adventure as the Coffee Center has always taken espresso coffee seriously from an engineering and sensory standpoint. We particularly appreciate the important component of the Coffee Center being the precious human element at every point in the chain from seed to cup.”

The 7,000-square-foot facility is a cross-departmental research building dedicated to coffee agriculture, green coffee storage, brewing laboratories, sensory laboratories, chemical and analytical laboratories, and even a roastery. The coffee center’s roots date back to 2013 when William Ristenpart and Tonya Kuhl first offered the course “The Design of Coffee,” which taught students chemical engineering through the lens of coffee science. In 2015, with support from La Marzocco, amongst other sponsors, the class offerings were expanded to include sensory science, agricultural studies, and the first version of the brewing lab. Now with a permanent home, the Coffee Center has a broad-scope approach to bringing academic research to coffee studies.

“The UC Davis Coffee Center opens a massive door for bringing the credibility of academia to coffee,” says Tim O’Connor, a La Marzocco partner who assisted with the early days of the Coffee Center’s founding. “I learned about espresso from the ground up. I was lucky enough to meet some of the masters of espresso at the time, but now the Coffee Center broadens access to institutional coffee knowledge to a much wider audience.”

Supporting the UC Davis Coffee Center is an extension of La Marzocco’s commitment to coffee education, mirroring the company’s own Accademia del Caffè Espresso facility in Pian di San Bartolo, Italy, which also features sensory and brewing labs to support coffee education growth.

Source: La Marzocco