Why am I coming out? Australians commitment to “good” coffee is strange. It seems everyone is an aficionado now.
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As a young man in the 1980s, cappuccino was a luxury you could get when you went to an Italian coffee house. It was only non-Anglo migrants, Greeks, Italians, Lebanese and Turks, and a cluster of bohemians who drank non-freeze-dried coffee.
The mass was largely satisfied with instant coffee and the occasional cappuccino.
Greek pulverised coffee (not to offend any of our cousins), or Arabic Turkish, Balkan coffee, and instant, was the coffee I grew up with. It was not until 1986 when I lived in Vienna that I understood the diversity in coffee. A place whose intellectual energy from the 17th century onwards was born in coffeehouses.
It was around the same time that I fell in love in Greece with that unique iced coffee of frappe – the Greeks are the only people on earth who made instant coffee taste good as a frothy iced drink.
Later in the mid-1990s in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, I fell for the milky brew in a pint-glass served at a local kopi tiam.
Everyone is a latecomer to coffee if they’re not Ethiopian, where it all begins. Coffee empires from the Caliphates who introduced it to the Middle East, and Asia as they colonised and traded, the Ottomans who introduced it to the Balkans, then the French, Spaniards, and British – coffee-fuelled empires.
Things have changed. One of the reasons we drink real coffee, not chicory-flavoured 1950s Aussie imitations, is because of new markets like Brazil and Vietnam.
Now, only 250 meters from home, in my gentrified northern ’burb, if I decide to walk for a coffee at my local caf, I will have to spend an hour working through a weave of coffee mutations. Many of them which should be illegal like – pumpkin-dusted almond latte (wrong), of a decaf soy latte. Why drink coffee if you want decaffeination is something I never understood. Or for the uber-hip, the three-quarter latte or slow cold brew fusion. Seriously, coffee is not a socio-political statement.
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Coffee, either as an espresso hit, a cafe latte in the morning – no one should ever drink a milk coffee after 11am – or a languid muddy Greek/Turkish brew had over long discussion is the best. Yet, that petrol station coffee for $2 in the car is one small joy, a liminal time-out-of-time.
Fotis Kapetopoulos is a journalist for the English edition of Neos Kosmos, a leading Greek-Australian masthead.
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We Greeks know caffeine and I’m telling you, servo coffee is the best
