Mokaflor

Mokaflor was founded in 1950 by Vasco Bernini, a former accountant who moved into roasting and built a company now in its third generation of family ownership. Bernini's founding choice ran against the postwar Italian trend toward thick crema and heavy Robusta content, roasting styles built for volume and a particular textural signature rather than for variety-specific flavor.

Mokaflor's alternative was a slow discontinuous-drum roast, taking 15 to 20 minutes per batch and tuned separately for each variety rather than applying one profile across the board — a far longer and more deliberate process than the fast, high-volume roasting the market was moving toward at the time. That founding decision has carried through three generations of the same family running the company, meaning the current roasting approach is a continuation of Bernini's original break from convention rather than a later rebrand.

In a city and country where dark, fast-roasted, Robusta-heavy espresso became the default, Mokaflor's 15-to-20-minute discontinuous-drum process is a seven-decade-old counter-argument still being roasted out today.