The Mokalux roast rises gradually: it starts at one hundred degrees and reaches two hundred and ten within twenty minutes. It is the heart of the craft. Rising too fast means burning the outside and leaving the inside raw; rising too slowly means cooking the bean without developing it. That curve is the signature of a roastery, and each one has its own.

Here the curve is made by the wood fire. It is the traditional method the company states it has kept for more than four generations: oak wood, not gas. Those who still do it, in Italy, can be counted.

It would be convenient to tell this roastery as a museum. It is not. The company states that it uses highly innovative machinery and, at the same time, that it has not lost its artisan soul — the two things sit in the same sentence, and it is not a contradiction.

It is the difference between preserving a tool and preserving a know-how. A tool can be updated; the decision about when to stop the fire cannot. That stays where it has always been, that is, in a person watching the colour of the bean.

The thing the public understands least about coffee is why blends exist. The answer Mokalux gives is technical and honest: every lot has a personality of its own. Coffee is an agricultural product, it changes from harvest to harvest and from plantation to plantation, and if it were bagged just as it comes the customer would find a different cup every time.

Blending different qualities serves two purposes: making the coffee rounder, that is, without sharp edges, and making it consistent — what you buy in March must taste like what you bought in November. It is a work of balance that is redone at every change of lot, and that nobody sees.

Out of this work come the house blends: Mokalux, Extra Bar, 100% Arabico and the Speciale Monorigine Arabica.

On the specialty shelf there is the Indonesian Kopi Luwak, which the company itself presents for what it is: one of the most debated and most expensive coffees in the world. Debated because it comes from a process that passes through the digestive tract of the civet, and because in Indonesia there is an intensive production that keeps the animals in cages.

Mokalux puts the clarification in the product profile: the coffee it sells comes from plantations where the civet lives free. It is the kind of line a careless seller does not write, because it obliges you to know where the goods come from.

The other highlight of the specialty shelf is the Columbia Supremo Rum: one hundred per cent arabica, kept for six months inside barrels that held tafia — the raw sugar-cane distillate from which rum is obtained. The wood passes on to the bean what it has absorbed.

Beside it stand the Jamaica Blue Mountain, the Ethiopia Sidamo, the Cuba Serrano, the Nepal Mt. Everest and a Brasil Catucai with an offset carbon footprint. It is a shelf you would not expect from a provincial roastery, and it says that here coffee is bought by people who know what they are looking for.

There is a good irony in a roastery from 1920 producing compatible capsules. But it is exactly the craft: this is how people drink their coffee, and those who have been roasting it for a century can put their own blend inside instead of leaving the field to those who do not make the blend.

The range covers the real formats of Italian homes: ground for the moka and for espresso, one-kilo whole beans for those with a machine, paper pods, capsules compatible with the most widespread systems. Same roast, different containers.

In March 2025 Alice Piazzesi spoke to the local press on behalf of Mokalux. The subject was transport, the tramway, the roads of the Piana fiorentina. These are the problems of those who every day have to get sacks in and parcels out of Calenzano.

It is a detail worth more than ten lines of storytelling. Mokalux is a business immersed in the concrete problems of the Florentine production territory, and it speaks up when it needs to.

In October 2024 Mokalux joined the twelve businesses of the second edition of A Scuola di impresa, the project run by the CNA of the Piana fiorentina that takes students inside companies. On 30 November of that year the roastery opened its doors for the open day; it had already held one of its own in December 2023.

The CNA also devoted a workshop-visit page to it. Those who roast over wood, evidently, have something to show that does not come across on a slide.