Andrei Costa runs the bar at Bonanno Roasters in Marsa. Roasts the beans most of this list buys. Quietly the most influential person in Maltese coffee.
What you notice first is that Andrei doesn't talk about coffee the way most people who care about coffee do. There's no jargon, no name-dropping, no anxious reach for credentials. The work happens in the cup. The conversation happens after.
Andrei came to the role the way most of the best baristas on the island did — slowly, by way of a couple of false starts and one very good shop that taught the lesson properly. The roastery is half the work; the bar is the other half, and they read each other constantly.
On the day we sat down, the espresso programme was tracking better than the last review captured. Andrei talks about milk the way someone else might talk about a discipline they trained for — there's a method, the method is teachable, and the method is what separates a good shop from a great one.
We left after forty minutes with two coffees and a list of questions we didn’t get to. Andrei doesn’t tend to have time for long interviews — there’s a queue, and the queue is the point — but the answers were the kind that stay with you longer than the questions did.
Andrei is one of the people who built the floor of Maltese coffee, and the floor keeps rising. We'll be back.