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| Coffee & Chicory (Pic courtesy museums Victoria) |
I’ve been around long enough, gentle reader, to have lived through some remarkable changes in the way we drink coffee in Australia.
As far as I can remember when I was growing up, my parents never drank coffee. They were both tea drinkers. The coffee that was around at that time was execrable, which may have had something to do with it.
I do remember my mother always having a Coffee substitute in her pantry. To this day I'm not sure what it was used for. Perhaps it was part of a cake recipe. It was never used to make coffee.
When I was old enough to leave home, I started drinking instant coffee occasionally. Working as a young teacher in the bush meant that I was exposed to staff room milk. If you're not familiar with staff room milk, suffice to say that it was frequently off on Mondays, after sitting in the staffroom across the weekend. This forced me to drink black tea, a habit I've maintained. I could never stomach black coffee.
Then I was called up conscripted, the tea and coffee often came in ration packs. At this time I reverted to coffee, perhaps because it was a mild stimulant. Mostly in the army I was bored stiff, and the caffeine provided a little bit of excitement.
This continued once in Vietnam, although occasionally there was some excitement. Drinking coffee had by this time become a habit.
Back in civvy street I remained addicted to coffee and cigarettes, but gave up the latter cold turkey by refusing to buy smokes. The social pressure (smokers retreating when they saw me approaching to bum a durry) did the trick.
A few years back into teaching I had an itinerant job supporting kids with disabilities in bush schools, and saw the inside of plenty of roadhouses. They almost always had a boiling urn and enormous tins of instant (usually Bushells) coffee in the corner.
I returned to this work post retirement (which I failed first time round), but by then (2010) proper barista coffee was becoming available in these same roadhouses. It was usually served by backpackers with interesting accents.
The contrast between what was available in the seventies in the bush, and what is sold now is stark.
Trips to Vietnam post retirement introduced me to Vietnamese coffee (very strong and smooth and served with condensed milk) and a sojourn in the USA and Cuba in 2018 revealed that American coffee is not a patch on ours. I found the Vietnamese brew slightly more robust than what I encountered in Cuba. Both were better on the street than in the USA, but not of the quality that you can find locally.
Whilst I probably haven't travelled enough to make any reasonable comparisons, I reckon that Australian coffee is amongst the best in the world. Italian immigration post world war two probably has much to do with this. An Italian coffee culture developed first in Melbourne and has spread. Having said that, when I was in Italy in the eighties, I don't remember being impressed by their coffee.
Australian coffee culture has been exported to the USA and chains have developed.
Australians are great innovators, they import excellent beans, and their baristas are the best. The machines used are invariably good quality and this helps. We're now growing coffee on the Atherton Tableland, so the coffee scene can only improve.
Only the best of everything originates in that part of the world, including my bride...
