I was reading through some phlogs today and came across this:
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/against-connoisseurship.txt
Solderpunk asserts that Australia and New Zealand are coffee neophytes
and that we have no idea of how to drink coffee.  I protest!

That may have been the case up until maybe 10 years ago, but the world
I live in is populated by coffee snobs - including myself.  The most
promising business opportunity in Australia today is to open a cafe
that sells good, barista made coffee.  Even country towns are
developing a cafe culture that have served me with excellent coffee.
Most people I know would not be seen dead drinking instant coffee!

Granted, in my younger years as a teenager in the 70's and young adult
in the 80's, we all drank a 'standard white' coffee - a teaspoon of
Nescafe, 2 teaspoons of sugar and a good slurp of milk.  

Over the next few decades, we began to see an influx of coffee shops
fitted out with expensive barista coffee machines with beautiful
aromatic scents and loud hissing sounds making these lovely coffee
drinks called cappachinos.  Later some of us progressed to espressos,
and that Australian icon, the long black (an Americano to the rest of
the world).  

On a trip to the United Kingdom last year, I was dismayed at the poor
quality of their coffee.  They serve Americanos in giant oversized
mugs.  The only decent coffee I found was in a small cafe in
Edinburgh, Scotland, where they served long blacks!  Of course, it was
owned by an Australian.

On the same trip, we visited Belgium, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and
Croatia.  No trouble getting good coffee there.

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2018-02-28
bradmac@freeshell.org