The year 2001 was important for the coffee industry. A home barista revolution was taking place in the US; David Schomer was busy modifying his LM Linea with a PID. In this same year, Paolo Dalla Corte, together with his sister Elsa and their father Bruno, founded the Dalla Corte company in Milan, Italy. Dalla Corte pushed innovation forward by implementing PID-controlled multi-boilers in the company’s first commercial release, the Evolution espresso machine. After exploring the many advances in technology since the beginning of the 19th century that made machines more and more stable, we have reached the digital era.
BH: You founded the Dalla Corte company with your father and your sister. Can you explain to us a bit about your inspirations for founding the company and for building the Evolution machine?
PDC: After spending 10 years as technical manager in the company founded by my father, Spaziale, and with the experience gained in the technical service, we noticed that different local markets were facing the same issues: following an evolution of coffee, the limitations of machines with traditional technology (with thermosiphonic circulation) led both my father and I to re-think a new operating technology to overcome these limits.
After carrying out tests on traditional machines to change the temperature-boiler and temperature-groups ratios – the temperature of the latter being a consequence of the boiler temperature – we started considering the idea of disconnecting the brewing units from the main boiler.
A similar principle had been implemented by other brands in the 1950s, but we wanted to achieve complete independence for each brewing unit to make an espresso machine even more flexible from a thermal point of view, and therefore adaptable to any type of coffee, origin and roasting.
The idea of founding a new company came after leaving the previous company, which I left when I no longer recognised myself in the company’s new brand identity after the generational switch. To create this new technology and propose it to the market, we had to turn Dalla Corte into something more than just a surname,