Drip coffee - a novelty in Australia
I was about to start uploading pictures from my mudcrabbing excursion, when I came across this picture of McDonald’s coffee and it doesn’t really go with the mudcrabbing so I decided I’d devote a blog blurb to it.
In case you didn’t already know, I [heart] coffee. In fact, I love coffee so much that my first two university papers were written about coffee (the history of it for an English paper and the effects it has on memory for a Psychology paper).
Australia has great coffee, but there are a few differences in terminology here that I think are noteworthy for a North American coffee lover:
In North America, a “regular” or “black” coffee means a cup of drip coffee. In Australia, a “regular” is usually a “flat white” (think latte but without the 1/4 foam) and a “black” is usually a “long black.”
Around 2004, Starbucks changed all of their coffee machines in Canada from the traditional manual hand-held espresso machines to the fully automated monsters. Since then, they haven’t been able to produce a real “long black.” A long black is a black coffee made through the espresso machine where the water goes through one scoop of grinds until you tell it to stop. Because the automatic monsters will only allow you to produce one shot per scoop, if you order a “long black” at a Canadian Starbucks you’ll either get several espresso shots that fill up the cup (if the barista is really nice), or an Americano (a couple shots of espresso with hot water). If this has changed, please let me know.
In North America, a “macchiato” is like a latte except the shot of espresso is put in after the hot milk is poured rather than before. In Australia, a “macchiato” is a small but strong cup of espresso with a bit of milk on the top to give it a sort of light brown top that trickles down through the coffee. In North America, you normally don’t have to add anything to the macchiato because the fancy drink you’re ordering (ex. caramel macchiato at Starbucks) already has lots of sugar in the syrups. In Australia, you need to add your own sugar and I usually put two in mine.
In North America, a “short black” at a Starbucks is a very small cup of regular drip coffee. In Australia, it’s an espresso shot! I found this out at a McDonald’s one day when I ordered it and thought the cup they gave me was really light (they serve the espresso shot in the same cup size as a regular coffee). I opened the cup to find that it was 80% empty but the shot that was in it was strong stuff.
I’ll admit Australia has a much better appreciation for coffee than North America, but sometimes you just want a cup of the stuff you get back home. Whenever I asked for drip coffee, the barista would look at me as if I was daft. Who wants drip coffee? That’s shit. Yeah yeah whatever. I eventually stopped asking at the nicer coffee bars.
Then one day when I was in Mooloolaba I got all excited because I found regular drip coffee on the menu at McDonald’s! When I ordered it though, the server said they didn’t have any and they only served the espresso pronto drinks (ie flat white, latte etc). You have no idea how disappointed I was. 
Then last weekend when I was waiting for my train at Central Station, I walked into the McDonald’s to get breakfast and lo and behold I saw a pot of DRIP COFFEE!!!! I was SO EXCITED! The server was laughing at me a bit, but I didn’t care. I’d been here for over a month and a half and this was the FIRST time I came across actual drip coffee. It cost the same as a flat white, and it was worth every penny (by the way, Australians don’t have pennies – your total price gets rounded down to the nearest five cent denomination).
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