In defence of Aussie coffee
---------------------------

bradmarc leapt to the defence of Australian coffee culture[1] in response to my
post[2] on connoiseurship - and rightly so.  I did try to, briefly, make this
clear in the post, but perhaps it's better to have it out in the open.

It is *not* true that you can't get good coffee in Australia, or New Zealand, or
that people there don't know how to appreciate good coffee when it is on offer.
On the contrary, I think in that regard down under is actually a really
excellent place to be.  The cafe scene in major ANZAC cities is generally very,
very good.

The whole coffee thread was kicked off by Alex asking "How do you prepare coffee
at home?"[3], and it was this in particular, i.e. at home preparation, that I
was talking about.  Now, granted, I don't think there is anywhere on Earth where
it's normal to make espresso in your own home every day (but I don't doubt there
is some small number of people who do, even in Australia).  But I also think
Australia is unusual in that you could serve instant coffee to a visitor and
nobody would consider you a bad host for doing so.  Unless I'm out of touch, I
think that making coffee directly from ground beans in the home on a regular
basis, which is very normal in the US and much of Europe (even if the beans were
ground a long time ago in a factory), would still be a (very slightly) fancy
affair in Austrlia, with instant coffee being the default expectation.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/bradmac/Log/2018-02-28.txt
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/against-connoisseurship.txt
[3] gopher://alexschroeder.ch:70/02018-02-16_Coffee