PROFILE Victoria Arduino
Inspiring genius THE BLACK EAGLE MAVERICK ESPRESSO MACHINE FROM VICTORIA ARDUINO PROVIDES BARISTAS WITH AN INSTRUMENT TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES AND THEIR COFFEE IN A NEW LIGHT.
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maverick is someone who blazes their own trail, breaking free from the mould and looking past the way things were traditionally done. This is the type of barista Victoria Arduino had in mind while developing its latest espresso machine, the Black Eagle Maverick. “Victoria Arduino has always been inspired by the people behind the machine. When we decided to update our iconic Black Eagle machine, we wanted it to be something that would inspire them and their genius as well, to create something different and bring their ideas to life,” says Marco Feliziani, Vice-President of Simonelli Group. “Jimi Hendrix played guitar like nobody else, but it wouldn’t have been possible if Fender hadn’t built the Stratocaster guitar. That invention gave Jimi Hendrix an instrument to express his genius in that way, and this was the idea behind the Black Eagle Maverick.” The Victoria Arduino Black Eagle has become an icon in the global coffee industry, gracing the bench of the World Barista Championship (WBC) since 2015. Feliziani says it was no easy task to revolutionise such a highly regarded espresso machine. “The Black Eagle is a very innovate machine. It provided barista champions with technology that was very precise in temperature and volume. When you create an iconic coffee machine for the barista and coffee communities, tied to the WBC, elevating that experience is not easy,” Feliziani says. “To do this, we introduced new technologies to allow baristas to reach their full potential and streamlined the design to make the machine more accessible to a wider variety of coffee shops.” It was important to Victoria Arduino that it consult the very baristas that will use the coffee machine every day to ensure the Maverick meets all their needs and requirements. “When we create new designs or innovations, it is not something we do on our own. We take
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all the advice, feedback, and trust from the people working behind our machines over the years and use that to create something new and different that is focused on their needs and expectations,” Feliziani says. Before launching the Black Eagle Maverick, Victoria Arduino identified several ‘coffee mavericks’ from the WBC circuit and invited them to preview and collaborate on the new machine. These leading baristas include 2019 China Barista Champion Simon Sun, 2019-2020 Indonesia Barista Champion Mikael Jasin, 20152016 Irish Barista Champion and 2017, 2020 Polish Barista Champion Natalia Kwiatkowska, and 2016 United States Barista Champion Lem Butler. Feliziani says each barista champion saw something unique in the Black Eagle that spoke to them and how they express themselves through coffee. For Simon Sun, it was the T3 Genius technology providing absolute control over the extraction.
