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