We’ve posted before about Melbourne’s claim as the coffee capital of Australia. In addition to the Melbourne Coffee Review Web site we noted back in 2007 (in operation since 2004), there is now a printed guide to Melbourne’s top 100 coffee shops with the title Melbourne Coffee Review: Crema of the crop – Epicure – Entertainment – theage.com.au.

Some 20 reviewers make up the short reviews on the Web site and, now, guide. And not unlike the Gambero Rosso Bar d’Italia, places with the top coffee scores earn three beans. Within this guide, beneath the sacrilegious paper cups brandished on its cover, these three-bean cafés include these three locations: 7 Seeds, Brother Baba Budan and St. ALi.

As some of you might know, this Web site started with the idea for a printed, local coffee guide in 2002. We’ve been published before, and our book proposal seemed to fit a real opportunity and need for a town brimming with coffee history and culture.

But after engaging with a number of local guide mongers — including Chronicle Books, Globe Pequot Press, Sasquatch Books, Sunbelt Publications, and TenSpeed Press — we were dismayed by how clueless these publishers were about the market for local information on quality coffee. It was as if we were proposing to write a book reviewing public toilets in SF. (Come to think of it, that’s not so terrible an idea either.) Thus in 2003, out of frustration, we took our research directly to the Web.

Of course, the world is awash in wannabe authors with bad ideas and grudges against “clueless” publishers. (Insert disgruntled, misunderstood scientist cackling, “They laughed at my ideas and called me mad! But I’ll show them… I’ll show them all!“) But the publication of yet another local coffee shop guide, with ratings based on coffee quality, adds just a little more fuel to our we-told-you-so fire.

Also overheard in Melbourne…

So what else is going on, coffee-wise, in Melbourne — the city that also gave us talents as diverse as Rupert Murdoch, Steve Irwin, Olivia Newton-John, and Flea?

Recently, the local press published a story promoting the coffee, prices, and siphon brewing equipment of a Melbourne café that curiously reminded us of an old Blue Bottle Cafe post: Coffee lovers forking out $12 a cup for trendy brews. And just before that, they published an article on their own new local roaster phenomenon, reminding us of our own from way back when: Ruling the roast.

So if Melbourne can publish a local coffee quality guide, what’s our excuse? Besides clueless publishers, that is…

We’ve long made it a policy to not cover superfluous news stories on Starbucks here because, well, they’ve long been irrelevant to quality coffee. But here’s one from Down Under today that is: Starbucks to close 61 Australian stores, cut 685 jobs | The Daily Telegraph.

Now we like looking for the hidden story behind the story. For example, a month ago when newspapers plastered their pages with news of Starbucks’ plans to close 600 U.S. locations (a story we considered irrelevant to quality coffee), we wondered why most ignored their plans to open some 200 new cafés next year. (Not to mention how the mass extinction event that affected hundreds of frozen yogurt chain stores in the 1990s never elicited this kind of “death watch” media attention and public mourning in the press.)

Starbucks has notably fizzled and failed in countries where there were good quality coffeehouses before they came along — nearby New Zealand, for example. With Starbucks closing some 70% of their Australian cafés over the next few days, it appears that Starbucks is finally listening to what Australian consumers have been telling them all along: “you lower the standards here.”

What is surprising is that Starbucks is bothering to leave any cafés open in the country at all. Looking at Starbucks’ Web site (Starbucks Coffee Company – Announcement to Customers 29th July 2008), we learn that they are consolidating their remaining Australian cafés in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney — Australia’s major metropolitan centers. In other words, Starbucks’ Australian strategy is to focus on tourists, business travellers and expatriates who are brand-loyal (read: brand-blind) enough to not realize that you need only swing a dead cat to find better espresso elsewhere in the country.

UPDATE: Aug 1, 2008
One thing that irks us are companies that do not own up to their failures and tend to blame everything else instead. While Starbucks has been quick to make a villain out of food and gas prices to explain their first-ever quarterly loss, we’ve smelled a smokescreen all along. After all, what’s more recession-proof than coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol?

Sure enough, look no further than the 69-percent quarterly profit rise posted by competitor Peet’s Coffee & Tea last night: Peet’s shares soar after 2Q report – Forbes.com. Curious that Starbucks’ new line of smoothies, introduced last month, are branded Vivanno. The word “Vivanno” looks curiously derivative of the Italian word vivranno, meaning “they will live”. Wishful thinking, perhaps?

UPDATE: Sept. 24, 2008
Undaunted, Starbucks is apparently ignoring their Australian lessons and have decided to forge ahead in the quality-espresso-saturated market of Portugal: The FINANCIAL, News That Makes Money, Business News & Multimedia – Starbucks Announces the Opening of Its First Store in Portugal. Isn’t one definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result?

The truth is out. What do die hard coffee drinkers in coffee-obsessed Australia really order?: Caffeine connoisseurs say lattes are the cream of the crop | Herald Sun. Yes, it’s the boorish latte. (And written by a boorish reporter: “Caffeine connoisseurs”?!? It’s been a while since we’ve seen the tiresome caffeine riff.)

Of course we’re being a bit facetious. But Australians are often cited as some of the greatest espresso connoisseurs in the world. And we at CoffeeRatings.com have heard a lot of smack talk from visiting Aussies, lamenting our national disregard for latte art and the inability to find a proper flat white (assuming anyone actually knows what one is).

The fact is — they’re right. Coffee standards are terrible in this country; they are one of the prime motivators that gave birth to CoffeeRatings.com five years ago this month. We generally serve over-extracted, bitter, watery dreck that is only made fit for human consumption after drowning it in gallons of milk and flavoring it with three kinds of syrup.

Even if that’s the rule, there are exceptions — and more exceptions thankfully appear around the nation every month. And while those exceptions are, say, easier to come by in towns like Seattle (which, as a rule of the masses, has generally terrible coffee standards as well), Australia has a coffee history and national obsession that makes these exceptions more commonplace.

But now we also know the “dirty truth”: behind every person who can drink a decent quality espresso in Australia, there are seven Aussies swigging down skinny/soy/chai lattes. Has the Australian coffee palate evolved much at all beyond our double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato? After reading this story, you’d be hard-pressed to say so.

So we asked our guest correspondent in Perth…

To get another perspective on this story and the “research” behind it, we asked Michael ‘Grendel’ Carroll what he thought about the Herald Sun‘s claims. Michael runs Cafe Grendel — a coffee review blog out of Perth, Australia. Granted, Perth is half a continent away from the Herald Sun‘s Melbourne, but at least they use the same currency.

Mr. Carroll first noted that the online poll associated with this Herald Sun story should be taken with a grain of salt. Given that the article mentions The Deck, better known as a restaurant, it calls the specialty coffee/cafe credibility of the Herald Sun into question. Mr. Carroll also noted, “It sounds to me as if (to use an Aussie slang) the owner [of The Deck] was ‘having a bit of a lend of himself,’ which is another way of suggesting he sounds a bit pretentious.”

And coffee pretentiousness is something of a problem Down Under, just as it is in very limited circles in the States. “While verbose descriptions of the various flavours and aromas have their place I think we may have taken it a little too far over here at times, and our coffee snobbery drifts to ridiculous levels,” said Mr. Carroll. “So much so that I and some fellow coffee snobs have a running ‘elderberry’ joke whenever we do a cupping.” Did Counter Culture Coffee recently open an office in Perth?

As in the U.S. as Australia, consumer knowledge and awareness of specialty coffee is spreading rapidly, raising consumer expectations for the coffee they drink. This in itself is a huge accomplishment. However, knowledge often inevitably leads to a rise in pretentiousness (see: the ever-popular wine analogy) — which can undermine more populist demands for better coffee. To counter this, Mr. Carroll wrote, “We will one day stop making rules for people, I hope, and allow them to enjoy coffee as coffee without placing too many subjective demands on the experience.” We could not agree more.

French coffee cuppers seem displeased with the San Ignacio Juana Mamami Huanca from Bolivia — or maybe they’re just being French.

One of the better espresso-themed events the world over is Sydney’s annual Aroma Coffee Festival at The Rocks, which will take place this year on Sunday, July 22: The Rocks – Sydney – Things to do in Sydney at The Rocks > What’s On at The Rocks > Aroma_Festival. OK, so they’ve since fattened up (diluted?) this event to include tea, spices, and chocolate. But it’s a great place to sample the local coffee for $1 (AUS) at the locus of Sydney coffee history. Plus good music, great scenery… (OK, so it’s winter Down Under.)

While we’re on the subject of international coffee, today’s The Hindu (India… and I guess quite obviously so) published an article documenting Melbourne, Australia’s claim to be at the heart of that nation’s coffee culture: The Hindu : Magazine / Columns : Coffee anyone?.

Melbourne has a pretty strong case. They have a rich coffee history, a vast number of quality cafés, coffee walking tours (“the Coffee Crawl”), and loyal readership behind the Melbourne Coffee Review (and there’s even a Melbourne Cafe Reviews). Exploring the obligatory “local angle”, the article also touches on the use of Monsooned Malabar beans from India.

UPDATE: June 4, 2007
Melbourne’s The Age essentially added to this story today, touching on the roots of Italian immigrants who changed the local coffee culture for the better in the 1950s: Ruling the roast – Epicure – Entertainment – theage.com.au.

In case liquid coffee extracts didn’t whet your coffee appetite, maybe instant self-heating coffee in a can will: Self-heating coffee launched in Australia > FOODweek Online > Main Features Page.

Per the product description:

To heat the coffee, the canister is tipped upside down and the tamper-proof seal is removed. An activation button is found underneath the seal which is pushed in, releasing water into the inner chamber that contains quicklime. The water, when combined with the quicklime, causes a natural exothermic reaction that creates heat. This heat is then transferred through the inner chamber to warm the coffee in the outer chamber. When the coffee has reached 62 degrees Celsius, a small circle on the side of the can changes from pink to white.

Just try getting that through airport security. But the truly scary part is the “flavors” it comes in — none of which are, well, “coffee” flavor. However, it is “available in Double Shot Latte, Hazelnut Latte, Mocha Latte and French Vanilla Latte for $4.99 (AUS)”.

CoffeeRatings.com was inspired by the importance of a scientific approach towards developing comparative reviews of espresso. But this somewhat clinical approach can at times take a little of the joy out of the espresso-sipping experience.

Which is why I am oddly inspired by the purely linguistic constraints imposed by a Melbourne, Australia blogger: Five word coffee shop reviews « My Opinions Are Important. Using five-word reviews, this approach — suggestive of haiku — is universally applied to describe the quality of the coffee at over 100 purveyors in Australia.

For those with a particularly ancient, arcane knowledge of the Web, they remind me of an old Web site of my own: the many terse album review entries in the Quick Fix Music Review List (which, due to personal neglect, sadly disappeared from the Web in 1996 … and yet lives on, like a phantom limb, in a handful of broken links around the Internet).

Need any more evidence that Fair Trade coffee isn’t unquestionably the “right thing to do” when it comes to poverty and the world’s coffee growers? Today’s The Australian reported on two Melbourne academics who have lodged formal complaints against Oxfam Australia, which oversees Australian Fair Trade certification, challenging that Fair Trade doesn’t achieve what it claims: Oxfam coffee ‘harms’ poor farmers | News | The Australian. To quote the researchers:

“Our primary complaint is that this is an unsustainable system. The only sustainable mechanism is through free trade. They are artificially cooking up the international coffee trade, to promote the interests of the Fairtrade brand and the people who sign up to it.”

Ouch. Put that in your biodeisel car and fry it.

And to think that in 2002 Berkeley academics tried to get Measure O passed, which would have criminalized any restaurant or café that served coffee that wasn’t Fair Trade certified — with violators facing fines up to $100 and six months in jail.

In today’s news, Australian inventors secured an international licensing agreement that stands to revolutionize one of my least favorite subjects: to-go coffee (Aussie Invention Ready to ‘Wow’ U.S. Coffee Drinkers – QSR Magazine). With the introduction of new, temperature-sensitive coffee lids, apparently McDonald’s customers can now be entertained by a show of colors before they scald their thighs.

Now if only we had coffee lids that would turn white whenever the espresso contained within the cups tasted like bitter, watery, over-extracted dreck. Wait! — we’ve already got that.

The meteoric growth in consumer demand for espresso has placed immense downward pressure on the skills of the average barista. Many coffee retailers (most notably Starbucks) have responded to this gap between supply and demand by introducing more automated machines and processes, enabling them to hire a wider availability of less skilled workers at lower salaries. Yet others are responding by trying to raise the bar — increasing the training and education of the average, or available, barista.

As reported here in a previous post, Australia is planning to address the problem, in part, through formal barista accreditation and licensing. But according to Rob Forsyth, barista and chairman of the AustralAsian Specialty Coffee Association, there is also the lost art of listening to customers — especially for a new crop who think they know it all: Coffee industry experts spill the beans on baristas – National – smh.com.au (from tomorrow’s Sydney Morning Herald). A little knowledge truly can be a dangerous thing.