Mario Alemi took an unusually route to the coffee aisle. Trained as a nuclear physicist, he eventually swapped particle detectors for extraction tanks — with a few stops along the way, from research labs and AI to the fields of Brazilian coffee farmers. In 2020 he co-founded Café 124, a Milan-based company that treats coffee as a physics problem: controlling the turbulence of cold extraction it produces a cold brew that stays fresh for months without preservatives — a method now the subject of a pending patent. He is at his happiest when a good coffee and an equation end up on the same table.