A late night rant - UK and USA, the Coffee and the Truth

July 1st, 2010

By DomTRON

I’m sick an tired of hearing my customers travelling to the USA and the UK and complaining that the coffee was terri-bad!

For starters the populations of these countries is much higher than ours in OZ, but if we looked at percentages of “good” cafes to bad it might be much similar to Australia, hell i know of only a handful of places in Sydney where i would want to drink a cup of coffee.

Did you know that the past four world barista champions are from these nations, 2010 Michael Phillips United States, 2009 Gwilym Davies United Kingdom, 2008 Stephen Morrissey Ireland,
2007 James Hoffmann United Kingdom.

Whilst the gourmet coffee industry initially gained allot of its learning and expertise from the Italians, it has been the yanks and poms that have led us into the millennium and really fine tuned our methods of sourcing coffee (mercanta), roasting coffee (monmouth) and preparation of brewing methods (schomer).

When i first entered barista competitions back in 2003, the baristas with the edge had read one book, that book was david schomer’s espresso coffee: professional techniques, this book written by an American easily and clearly explained so much that we now take for granted in Australia.

For years in Australia we were at the mercy of what our green bean brokers were bringing in, and our brokers for many years were comfortable with green coffee that yielded low moisture levels and green coffee older than 12 months, two factors which inhibit a cups quality, yes Australia is quite far from most growing regions, so logistically getting the coffee to Australia is difficult but its companies like Mercanta a UK based green bean sourcer that aims to provide 100% traceability and the best freshest green coffee that has made our current brokers step up and realise that our Australian micro-roasters will not be satisfied with the current service, thank god Mercanta is now also delivering to Australia!

Also the current trend in micro-lot-roasting, is a lighter roast which is greatly influenced by companies like Monmouth, they were also pivotal in revitalising filter brewed coffee which has seen a renaissance in Australia in the last few years.

So lets have some respect because even though you travelled and got a poor excuse for a cup of joe that resembled some sort of swill from the bar room floor, these countries are leading gourmet coffee and “we/the ozzies” are actually following them!