Opinion
Australians proudly claim our coffee the world’s best. Perhaps it’s time to look up from our flat whites and see what the rest of the world has to offer.
You may have heard that last week Toby’s Estate in Chippendale in Sydney was named the best coffee shop in the world. Melbourne’s Proud Mary came in at No.4, and all in all, nine Australian venues made the top 100.
No shade on any of those awarded, whom I am sure do what they do extremely well, but let’s be honest here.
There was a time when, if some marketing folks came to you and proclaimed they had appointed themselves the global authority on coffee shops and were ranking all the coffee shops of the world (but without visiting them or providing any form of cogent methodology), they would be met with derision instead of being given free global media coverage.
Sadly, that is no longer the news ecosystem we find ourselves in.
Everyone loves getting an award. It does, however, prompt a broader question: does Australia have the best coffee culture in the world?
Of course we do! As long as you don’t want one after 3pm.
We make great coffee in Australia, but we’ve built our national personality as coffee aficionados entirely around the simple idea of drinking lattes with a little bit less milk.
Australian coffee culture has wrestled with the idea of “a little bit less milk” for the best part of 40 years. We have dozens of different ways to order it.
Our beloved flat white kicked off third-wave Australian coffee culture in the 1980s. Served in a cup with a somewhat smaller capacity than a latte glass, the slightly concentrated flavour produced by having “a little bit less milk” (and foam) was a revelation to us.
Arguably the most exciting coffee in the world today is in Japan.
Now we’ve decided we like coffee even more than we did back then, so we order a “three-quarter latte” (or “three-quarter flat white” if you have sociocultural concerns around saying the word “latte”).
A piccolo is one of our most popular coffees, but it can vary wildly from something macchiato-sized to something twice as large. If you’re truly insufferable, you might be tempted to ask for a “cortado”.
In Perth, you’ll order a “long mac topped up”, for some reason, and if you’re from Melbourne, you can order a “magic” before telepathically communicating with the barista that you’ve both made living in Melbourne and liking coffee a key part of your personalities.
You can solve this Australian problem of wanting “a little bit less milk” by ordering more coffee instead. Ask for a “strong flat white” or a “flat white extra shot” or a “double shot latte” (which might actually be three shots, because normal lattes are already two shots).
Despite what baristas may tell you, in practice these are all essentially the same thing. If you’re from Melbourne, you probably immediately bristled at the idea that a coffee in Melbourne might be the same as coffee elsewhere in the country, but it is true.
More recently we’ve added a suite of alternative milks that we can order a little bit less of, and even though everyone just wants to drink a latte with a little bit less of some kind of milk, we’ve convinced ourselves that it somehow means we have the best coffee in the world.
We have a great coffee culture. Australian cafes are popping up from New York to Shanghai, a fitting legacy to the late Bill Granger, whose idea of a sunny Australian cafe changed the way the world sees us and how we see ourselves.
I’m glad that Australia is finally throwing off the shackles of cultural cringe and celebrating what we do well, but perhaps a little perspective is in order.
Swedish fika is an integral part of Swedish identity, and Scandinavian coffee, from Denmark to Stockholm, has been cool as hell for 20 years. Much of the sleek Scandinavian design that boomed in popularity through the 2000s came from Scandi cafe culture.
Arguably the most exciting coffee in the world today is in Japan, where cutting-edge roasting and brewing is intersecting with the revitalisation of kissaten culture. Japanese-inspired coffee shops are opening all around the world, too, including here in Australia.
Ethiopian coffee is so culturally important that people get dressed up to serve and drink it, and I don’t mean in activewear. In Singapore and Malaysia, kopitiams are ubiquitous, with their unique Hainanese coffee and kaya toast, and slick, modern versions have been popping up all over South-East Asia for a
long time.
Vietnamese cafes are the centre of daily life. People congregate around them from as early as 4am until late into the night, and fourth-wave Vietnamese coffee is very much a thing both within Vietnam and abroad.
For every Australian cafe opening around the world, there are probably 10 new Thai cafes, 20 Japanese kissatens and a thousand bubble tea joints. With so much happening in global coffee, can we be confident that our coffee really is the best in the world?
Probably not, but at the end of the day, perhaps it’s not important. We got some silly awards and besides, at the end of the day, you can’t get a cup of coffee here anyway.
Read more from Adam Liaw’s column ‘Stirring the Pot’
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Adam Liaw is a cookbook author and food writer, co-host of Good Food Kitchen and former MasterChef winner.
