The Coffee Ponce.

Coffee in the shadow of the cathedral. Quito, Ecuador. 

And now for something completely trivial: coffee.   In my pre-coffee days I would look on whilst friends ordered a “double shot extra hot wet latte” or some such – allowing myself a small sense of satisfaction, safe in the knowledge that I would never succumb to being a Coffee Ponce.    But coffee snobbery is now a recognised social phenomenon and almost everyone I know has an opinion on it. When Anita and I travelled around the world we sampled a huge amount – and variety - of the stuff. Central America, Australia, New Zealand, the USA: we could always, without difficulty, find someone who would swear that their coffee was the best.  So, here are my completely unscientific observations on global coffee trends.  I will undoubtedly cause great offence to some of my friends (ok, specifically to my Australian friend Justine) with what I am about to write. But these are my opinions, and because they are my opinions, they cannot be wrong. Right?

Central America

Central America can be dealt with in short order. The coffee is universally terrible.  I know, I was surprised too. They grow coffee here, so they really should know what they are doing. I have to say I found it to be thick, sludgy, strong, bitter, and generally unpalatable without huge quantities of sugar.  Of course, it could just be that I always happened to drink it whilst consuming the ubiquitous Central American breakfast of eggs, cheese, tomatoes and re-fried beans.  That meal haunts me still: we ate it for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner. Every day.  It is, I think, impossible to remain enthusiastic about eggs, cheese, tomatoes and refried beans after five days on the trot. Unless you are Anita. She just lapped it up, every time.

Australia

There are many, many, many Australians who are convinced that Australia is the home of coffee.  I can exclusively reveal, however, that if Australia is the home of anything coffee-related, it is the home of unsatisfactory ill-defined milky coffee.  Almost every one-horse town between Perth and Sydney has one or more coffee shops, none of which seem able to differentiate between a Latte and a Cappucino. This was, as Anita will confirm, a source of disproportionate - and irrational – annoyance for me.  Only when I reached Sydney was I able to enjoy something close to what I think a cappuccino should be.  (In fact there were two places – somewhere in Bondi, and some other place that Jon took me to in town – ask him, he’ll tell you what its called).  Australians are nothing if not resourceful, however, as I realised when we reached Melbourne.  Clearly fed up with irate Englishmen deriding their cappuccinos for being insufficiently foamy and too latte-like, the Aussies have taken to serving their in-between-milky-froth-pap-coffee-drink under a new (and totally made up) name. Behold: the Flat White.

New Zealand

Actually, forget everything I just said about Australia being the home of milky coffee. I love New Zealand, but this is a country where they ask you whether you want your latte in a bowl, for goodness’ sake.  Enough said.

The USA

Oh. My. Gosh. The USA, land of the free, land of Starbucks, land of the vente-double-syrup-shot-caramel-frapuccino with extra cream. Where to begin?  First, I should make it clear that there is a huge amount of coffee on offer throughout the USA, much of it of the free-refill-hotplate-warmed-filter-coffee-in-hometown-diner variety.  A quintessential American experience, ad certainly not to be missed. Two specific coffee experiences stick in my mind, however. First, leaving Monument Valley, on the border of Arizona and Utah, for a long drive north to Moab, we stopped for coffee at a roadside petrol station.  We had spent the night sleeping out in the open in the back of our pickup truck, and had risen at 4am to photograph the sunrise.  Now it was 7am, we had several hundred kilometres to drive, and I was already struggling to keep my eyes open.  I filled the tank whilst Anita nipped inside, ermerging minutes later with two huge cups of coffee. “I thought I’d better go for the strong stuff, just in case” she said.  Crikey Moses.  I don’t remember much of the next three hours, other than gripping the steering wheel tightly, and feeling like my eyeballs had gone outside of my head and were looking down at my hands from a funny angle. I also recall talking non-stop to Anita in a very animated fashion about the decline of standards in British University education, for which I now wish to apologise  I think I had my foot to the floor all the way. It’s a good job our truck wouldn’t go above 60mph.

My favourite USA coffee encounter by far, however, took place in a Starbucks on the outskirts of Las Vegas.  The lady in front of me in the queue asked for a “triple shot vente macchiato”.  Now call me old fashioned, but I thought a macchiato was a small shot of espresso with a smidgen of foam on top.  A 32 oz triple shot macchiato? Sacrilege! I could not let it pass.  “Excuse me” I asked, “did I understand that correctly – if you are having a macchiato, how can you have 32 oz and three shots?”. “Well,” the lady replied slowly, “I used to have five shots, but then my son stopped working at Starbucks and I no longer get freebies, so now I can only afford three.”  There was really nothing more to be said.

A final thought

I should say in conclusion that my days of ordering tea from coffee shops are long since over.  How could I have been such a philistine? Nowadays my tipple of choice is a small cappuccino, nice and foamy, half a sugar. The coffee of champions, I like to think.  And the best country? Without a doubt it has to be Italy.  Just as long as it is served in a smallish cup, not too much chocolate on top, and the sugar is stirred into the espresso before the milk is added, to maintain the integrity of the foam.  And only in the morning. Any later and it has to be a single espresso machiatto (no milk after eleven a.m. you see). 


And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I can confirm that my transformation into full-on Coffee Ponce is complete.