“PS - I've been to Australia a number of times and never found its coffee or "coffee culture" to be remarkable or much different from their counterparts here in the US.”

I get that, and to some extent it’s true, but the sad fact is that in the US unless you’re in a dedicated fancy coffee shop, the coffee is more likely to be drip coffee that’s been sitting on a warmer plate. In Australia these are almost unknown these days, everywhere has an espresso machine.

My MIL isn’t much of a coffee drinker, having been raised on tea. Whenever we had a family dinner in a restaurant, we pretty well always went back to the in laws’ to have coffee and dessert. MIL would haul out her drip coffee maker and make a pot of truly awful, weak coffee. One day, FIL asked me, ”How do you make good coffee? MIL’s isn’t the best.” I told him that for a start she needed to use more than double the amount of ground coffee she was currently using. It’s just struck me that she may have thought that it was the same amount per cup as you would use to make instant coffee, which was what she usually drank if she was having coffee- one teaspoon.

" unless you’re in a dedicated fancy coffee shop, the coffee is more likely to be drip coffee that’s been sitting on a warmer plate. In Australia these are almost unknown these days, everywhere has an espresso machine. "

No, I disagree.

What you describe is common in casual breakfast-type places called diners in the east and maybe coffee shops (but not that) in my region. More commonly these days is drip coffee in thermal carafes.

So called better quality coffee from "dedicated coffee" places are to be found every few blocks in urban and suburban areas. At many highway rest and service turnoffs. Many with espresso machines, at least in my area. I won't say that all workers in such places know how to use them but they're common and not rare.

It may be as you describe in other less populated areas or in areas with less of a good food and beverage tradition than my area has.

Edit to add:

Not that this is the best example of anything, and there are certainly a huge number of places not so affiliated, but there are 17000 Starbucks locations in the US. 3000 in my state alone. They tend to be in more populated and more highly trafficked areas. That's a lot of expresso machines, for a start.

Expresso??

Starbucks has gained almost no foothold in Australia as few people consider their coffee is drinkable.

"Expresso??"

Sure. The s and x keys are adjacent on a qwerty keyboard. Typo of kind often seen in this forum.

Starbucks coffee--the coffee itself--is indeed undrinkable. Its products are popular here in the U.S. primarily because of everything they add to the coffee. For most of my adult life, I haven't been able to consume calories for the first few hours after waking, so I've always drank just black coffee. I know a good coffee when I taste it, and Starbucks is foul.

And, yes, Colleen, coffee sitting on a warmer plate burns it. I'm currently using a drip machine, and I immediately turn off the warmer once it's done brewing. If I want to heat up the coffee, I put it in the microwave.

Apart from what I or my sister make at home, the 2 best cups of coffee I've ever had were, first, in Thailand at a B&B whose owner sourced coffee beans from a friend. It was divine. The next best cup was made by a friend's husband whose knowledge of coffee rivals that of what John posted above. He explained every step of the process of his brewing with precise detail. I don't remember those details, but I left thinking, "I wish I was as passionate about anything as he is of coffee."

I did see it on the news, Elmer, but it may have been the national news.

Usually I have milk and sugar in my coffee, though I can drink it without sugar. I’ve only ever enjoyed it black twice, once in the mountains in the north of Viet Nam where we were staying in a rural homestay and that was what was on offer as the place had no electricity so no refrigeration. It was actually quite good.

The other time was in Bali where I tried Kopi Luwak, yes, the kind where the coffee beans are eaten by a (really cute) civet cat/luwak and then processed after they have been through its digestive tract. We had observed how it was processed and had no qualms about drinking the coffee. It was really smooth, like all the corners had been rounded off, and quite pleasant to drink black.

Oh, Colleen, I can't wait to share the civet cat/luwak detail with my friend's husband. It will surely level up his obsession.

I am just having my first sips of coffee this morning and was trying to remember a term for something I was considering. And then it came to me. Passive aggressive. That's the term I was looking for. I'm thankful for the help of a good cup of coffee.

I hardly think Starbucks is undrinkable, and this is coming from someone who drinks his coffee black. But taste is subjective. There are also many thousands of Dunkins across the country and I have a hard time with THEIR coffee.

I find Starbucks coffee to be very bitter. One cup years ago was enough for me. Now if I go with friends, I will get hot chocolate. Our local one is completely inundated with school children after school lets out.

I’m easy. If it’s got cream in it, I’ll drink it. Pretty much any kind. I have to be sitting down and relaxed when I do, though.

My favorite “chain” coffee is Costa. Not really a StarBurnt (sic) fan.

We like our morning coffee but we are not mavens, aficianados, experts. We drink half-caf, already ground, usually stocked up when on sale. Drip. We doctor it with milk, usually 2% or dairy-alternative, with the occasional indulgence of whole milk or half-and-half. To make matters worse for those cringing already, I prepare it at bedtime, DH turns it on when he gets up about 3 or 4am. He does turn it off when he pours his second cup. So my first and subsequent cup a few hours later is microwaved. My new pleasure is the plug-in mug-warmer I received from DS for Christmas. Keeps it toasty warm.

When we stayed at a STR in the Alps, there was a Bialetti, thankfully with instructions. It made good coffee! When we got home I got one for DH’s birthday, and we used it for quite a while. But, we slipped back to the convenience of our drip maker.

When out and about, I can drink anyone’s coffee. Makes life easy.

As I mentioned before coffee is believed to come from Ethiopia. Way back when they often did not remove the berry pulp or necessarily even roast the beans. They were ground in a mortar put into a clay pitcher sort of affair and hot water poured onto to them, let steep and then poured in to small cups from a height to produce foam. I had coffee prepared for me by more or less the same process by a Palestinian guy I was dating. Very strong. Now that you slurped through a cube of sugar and no milk either. My grannie made coffee in a small drip pot. She used a quarter cup of dark ground coffee to make two very strong cups that were cut with milk to make what I later recognized as cafe au lait. She was from the southern part of Mississippi which had a strong French influence. Her small town had a French name. When the whole family was there they used a percolator. I was given coffee from a spoon when I was an infant. I dont remember not have a cup of coffee at breakfast.

I do not care at all for Starbuck's which is to my mind burnt and undrinkable be we also have Seattle's Best that actually predates Starbuck's by a couple of years. It is drinkable. I wonder what started the coffee frenzy here. With the climate you would have thought it would be a big deal from way back.

I found excellent coffee in Scotland back in the early 1990's when I spent several weeks wandering the countryside with my now ex. The farm wives seemed to all use a French press and also used very good well roasted coffee. I wish I had noticed how they made it in all the pastry shops where we stopped for things like sausage rolls and sweet pastries.

Coffee and tea were introduced into Europe right about the same time. It is curious that the English would embrace tea so much and the rest of Europe coffee. Of course they were drinking chocolate there before coffee or tea.

Patriciae, I think coffee has always been a big deall in Seattle because of the large Scandinavian population. I remember first drinking Starbucks in the early 1970’s. The first store at Pike Place Market was in the right place at the right time. I think they own Seattle’s Best. oh I just checked and Starbucks sold it to Nestle’s a couple of years ago. Torrefazione was my favorite brand and they also acquired that.

I expect you are right Olychick. SB was originally from Coupeville. Coffee is a big deal in a lot of places but I vividly remember trying to order some coffee at the Seattle center from a guy with a cart who could only understand that made up language they used to describe in bizarre detail your particular cup. Pedantic and weird. I had just moved back here and suddenly I couldn't get a cup of coffee since I didn't speak "coffee".

I assumed the coffee in Scotland was so good because of the Scandinavian influence.

Oh I just looked up who owns Seattle's best now and it has been sold to Nestle's

I always figured that coffee was popular in Seattle because of its ever-present damp, cold weather. I think attributing it to Scandinavian immigrants may be a stretch. There are many Scandinavian enclaves around the US with much higher population percentages than the PNW - especially Upper Plains locations like Minnesota, Dakotas, Wisconsin. Such areas and communities aren't known for an emphasis on coffee in their habits.

Been to any of the Scandinavian countries? I've been to all. Coffee tends to be much as I would call the German style - a small cup of drip coffee, on the strongish side but nothing to write home about.

"I assumed the coffee in Scotland was so good because of the Scandinavian influence." I really doubt it. You can get an excellent cup of coffee anywhere in the British isles. Also a really bad one. You were just lucky with your hosts.

Re tea. Coffee was drunk far more than tea before the latter became fashionable in the 17th century.

Interesting article:

https://seattlemag.com/seattle-coffee-guide-evolution-coffee/

The article starts out with the author admitting a prejudice about coffee in Seattle, saying " I am jingoistic about Seattle coffee, ". Whether it's jingoism, or a regional ethnocentrism as I mentioned before, that seems to be what's long been at play with this topic.

There is some confusion about the dateline of the article. At the top it says December 31, 1969 but it goes on to cite a number of events that occurred in later years. The author said she first moved to Seattle in 1993. And at the end it says, "Originally published October 2010"

As for the ubiquity of tea drinking in the British Isles, I suspect the transoceanic shipping and trade of the East India Company (founded in 1600) had a lot to do with it. .

Interesting, maybe:

Why websites use Dec 31, 1969

This is a super common technical artifact:

• Many content systems store dates as Unix timestamps.
• If a date field is empty or broken, the system may default to January 1, 1970 (UTC).
• Depending on time zones, that displays as December 31, 1969.

My DMIL from England is a tea drinker. She says friends are always giving her ”fancy“, or flavored, or herbal teas. I asked her what she likes. ”Whatever is on sale!”

I remember my first trip to Philadelpia in the early 1990's. Always searching for a decent cup of coffee (PNW style). There were all these little carts on the streets everywhere and my hopes would be dashed to discover they were always some kind of local sandwich favorite. Not a coffee cart in sight. I was at a conference with others from the PNW and we had no car, so we walked around the neighborhood...I spotted a COFFEE shop, obviously PNW style...empty of people, tho. We walked in and I exclaimed, "Boy am I glad to find you!" Without missing a beat, the proprietor said, "Seattle? Portland?" He made us some great coffee and I asked him how business was, as this was obviously a newish concept in the area. He said it was pretty good, though he could barely keep the sugar dispensers filled. Apparently, people there dosed their espresso drinks with a LOT of sugar.

Another trip to visit a friend in Baltimore - she picked me up in DC and we went to dinner in Georgetown - I think this was mid 1990's. We went for a walk after dinner to find someplace to have dessert. We saw lights for a business down a little side road, so headed that way. I was shocked to see a neon sign in the window advertising one of our really wonderful coffee roasters here in Olympia...Batdorf and Bronson. We went in and the decor was all stereotypical PNW... including the staff wearing plaid flannel shirts! It was really fun to be able talk B&B with them and I learned that they had expanded to Atlanta, which is probably how/why it had reached DC.

@colleenoz "... in Bali where I tried Kopi Luwak, yes, the kind where the coffee beans are eaten by a (really cute) civet cat/luwak and then processed after they have been through its digestive tract." Wow and people on the cooking forum are fussing about eating shrimp that hasn't been deveined!

It is traditional in some of Europe to drink your espresso with a little sachet of sugar. I quite like it, on occasion. In coffee shops, sugar is sometimes the only way to make a sour espresso shot drinkable.

My daily coffee at work, from the coffee shop across the street from my office, is an Americano. Their espresso shots are sour and their drip coffee is somehow sour too. I dump sugar and cream in that Americano, and it becomes drinkable. It is the only coffee shop around. I’m a creature of habit.

At home I only drink espresso shots, no sugar.

I don’t tend to use expensive, highly rated coffee beans for espresso. I think they are typically not good for that purpose.

Why? Coffee is rated by cupping, which is tasting a cup of roasted ground coffee in hot water. The coffee is effectively brewed with an immersion method, kind of like a French press, but perhaps steeped for a shorter time to be closer to drip. Anyway, the high rated coffees nowadays tend to have interesting, bright fruity notes; that’s what coffee tasters tend to look for. Naturally they tend to be light or light-medium roasts too, for the desired fruity notes.

Espresso is different from immersion or drip. Pulling a shot with that high rated coffee will often give you a sour shot. There are ways to reduce that effect. You can pre-infuse, or pull a long shot, maybe there’s other ways. They all make it more complicated.

But a low-rated coffee, with less fruit, and darker roasted, is more likely to yield a tasty shot without all that fuss.

And it’ll often be a cheaper coffee bean.

@olychick, as I said on the Cooking forum, the process of thoroughly washing the coffee cherries, peeling off the fruity outside part of the cherries to retrieve the beans, washing the beans then roasting them over a hot fire makes the likelihood of contamination by foecal matter incredibly low. This is no different than removing the intestinal tract from a shrimp. And as I said in my post above, having seen the process I was satisfied that I wouldn’t be drinking poop laden coffee.

@John Liu, I am frustrated that the current trend for coffee is heading more and more into bright, fruity notes because my preference is for plum, caramel and chocolate notes. For about 10 years I used to buy coffee from a specialty roaster but some five years ago or so I quit because their catalogue had fewer and fewer coffees whose tasting notes appealed to me. Now I drink Aldi’s Brazil coffee beans; they are low priced and I like the flavour just fine.

colleenoz, I feel the same way.

@colleenoz I was really just joking about the similarity. Doesn't it make you wonder how anyone first discovered that treatment for coffee?

I have a good stock of coffee in my pantry, none are coarse grind. I'll wait till I run out before buying a press.

So, back to the OP.

Jasdip, have you bought a press? Your review, please. 🤠

We’re listening.

Floral, while coffee was introduced a little earlier than tea they both spread in popularity at about the same time-starting around 1650. Since nice women did not go into coffee houses maybe that is why they went with tea as coffee had to be roasted and then ground making it at home more labor intensive? Tea was ready to have hot water applied in your very own parlor. I once read a fun and interesting research paper on how many teapots people bought as they were commonly broken fairly quickly. I suppose you know why coffeehouse culture ended. It is something I never thought to look up.

While Elmer might think coffee was such a thing in the PNW because of the chilly damp climate it doesnt explain why it is such a big deal in the hot and humid south. You know like New Orleans?

patricia, your attempted parallel is imaginative but seems to have a weak and unsupportable premise. I'll show why I think so.

When weather in the Pac Northwest or anywhere else turns cold and/or damp, people are often drawn to warming comfort food. Soups, stews, the like.

So how much of a contradiction is it that in New Orleans, where the weather is hot and miserably humid for at least half of the year, gumbo is a year round favorite? Call it soup, call it stew. Eaten piping hot when it's 90° with 75% humidity. It makes no sense to me, I'm more accustomed to eating cool or cold foods like salads in hot weather. Soup? Gazpacho. But that's what they do there.

Do you not make soup or stew with cold weather? Hot coffee, hot chocolate (which is also popular up your way), go along with eating warming food. People do different things in different places for different reasons.

So much for your parallel.

Different day, different thread, same story.

Feels a bit like Groundhog's Day to me.

Ditto on a milder scale but with the same intent. Try to add to a conversation rather than subtracting or adding nothing.

Could we adopt a practice of not poking each other when we haven’t even been addressed or mentioned?

@murraysmom Zone 6a OHGroundhog day indeed! 😊

Cold weather in the deep south is a short and fleeting thing. It can be impressively cold for a day or two or even a week but for no extended time. Half the year doesnt even begin to describe the climate but you would not know that so I extend a mulligan to you. Ergo people do not drink coffee just because it is chilly. There must be other reasons.

You changed the subject, I never mentioned cold weather in the south. No problem, I think it's resolved we have different opinions.

Actually, drinking hot drinks such as tea in hot weather is very commonly done in hot climates, and here’s why:

Why hot tea and chillies are good for you in hot weather

Yes, colleen, but that also wasn't what was being discussed.

My brother lived a few years in Thailand, where he learned to put butter in his coffee, not milk, cream, or sugar.I have yet to try this. Has anyone?

Bpath, I spent about a month in Thailand, but never tried coffee with butter. If I ever give it a go, it would have to be unsalted butter. Any sort of saltiness in coffee sounds dreadful.

@Elmer J Fudd, you started with ”I always figured that coffee was popular in Seattle because of its ever-present damp, cold weather.”

Patriciae pointed out that coffee is also popular in the south, where it is warm, so there must be something more to coffee’s popularity than climate.

You countered with a diatribe summarised as ”it makes no sense to [you]” that people in hot climates consume hot food and drinks rather than sensibly consuming cold foods and drinks as you do.

My reply is pointing out exactly why people in hot climates do as they do. Your claim that my reply isn’t pertinent to what was being discussed is on shaky ground.

It really doesn't matter. I've heard my suggestion about coffee's popularity in the Pac Northwest from others, including people from there, said in much the same way. And the same silly claims about originating coffee's popularity which is obviously untrue but of xenophobic-like origin, as previously described. The other side comments I responded to were irrelevant exceptions trying to disclaim the pattern.

Where would you guess hot coffee, hot tea and hot soup are more popular in Australia in July - cool damp Hobart in the South or warm sunny Darwin in the North? There's nothing more to it than that.

" Ergo people do not drink coffee just because it is chilly. There must be other reasons."

Of course there are other reasons. Italians, from sunny Sicily to chilly Milan, all drink coffee, irrespective of climate differences. I can guarantee that Australians in Darwin drink coffee year round. The British drink it as well, but their stand- by is tea. Indians love their chai, but also grow some decent coffee beans. So, for that matter, does Papua New Guinea (the local roaster in the little NSW town I used to live in did a blend of South American Arabica and PNG Robusta that was top notch. ) I know Jamaica produces great coffee and so, I believe, does Hawaii.

It's not climatic, it's cultural. Starting the morning with a brioche and a cappuccino, and finishing off dinner with a short blast of espresso, are driven by cultural and culinary habits, not the seasons.

Excellent find Colleen!

Now I did know lots of people all over the hot world drink hot things and I have always been told cold drinks will make you hotter. And then there is alcohol-the Victorian prescription for shock but a bad idea, also cools you down-do not use for hypothermia for instance. Very interesting stuff. Elmer wants to stick to the script of the PNW being jingoistic or what ever presumably because it suits his notions about an area he has routinely said he disliked. I can say what I like. I am from here. I just found it perplexing and to a degree annoying. Fortunately coffee speak seems to have gone out of style. They used to make fun of it on Frazier.

Communing over coffee is a very social thing to do. Some even meet a prospective beau or belle over a cup of coffee before deciding to go forward with dating (I changed my wording here). Hardly regional.

" Elmer wants to stick to the script of the PNW being jingoistic or what ever "

There's no script, it's a personal opinion from what I've experienced. Yours is different. I don't have a horse in this race, maybe you do or don't. Fine.

I can think of a parallel - I've heard many SFers express that notion that the city's North Beach area (the old Italian neighborhood) and what were called its "coffeehouses" at the time originated and was THE US "Beat" (aka Bohemian) haven in the 50s. The source of the word Beatnik. That's fine, except it excludes larger districts in NY's Greenwich Village, a counterpart in LA and also at a few other places. A similar product of provincial, xenophobic thinking.