If you want something emblematic of the post-truth era in which we live, look no further than Melbourne’s claim to be a world leader in coffee. Something demonstrably false has been willed into existence by marketing spivs.
The city’s coffee ranges from unpleasant to the utterly undrinkable. Yet we’re being told that the bitter, burnt brew we’re being served isn’t just great – it’s somehow worth $6 of our hard-earned.
If your senses recoil, then you’re the problem, not the coffee, they say. It’s an acquired taste. Just keep drinking it. Cough up the cash until you accept that black is white and Australia is leading the world.
How did this happen? At what moment did we start simply repeating the coffee industry’s talking points?
If you need a sense of where we should be, try landing at Pisa airport. The coffee they serve – often in paper cups – is to die for: light, rich in flavour and with zero bitterness.
That’s the name of the game throughout Italy: a divine cup plonked on the counter with zero pretension. There’s no hipster barista with faux Polynesian tats rolling his eyes; no pouring of milk into cappuccinos to create a design resembling a hedgehog.
And the price. In my father’s Tuscan hometown, a cap will cost you €1.50 ($2.40); an espresso €1.30 ($2.10). The further south you go, the more the prices go down.
This isn’t about a romanticised view of Italy. We’re talking about a country that hasn’t built a public toilet this side of Emperor Vespasian and where most adults are afraid of air conditioning. Yet, somehow they know how to make coffee.
Why can a country like Italy get this so right when Australia stumbles at every point of the process?
I blame Melburnians. We wanted to embrace the lifestyle built around the cult of good coffee; we wanted the grungy bean roasters in groovy laneways. We also liked to dish out condescension: “I’d love to move to Sydney – but how could I live without coffee?”
If I started to drink three coffees a day at an Australian café, I’d receive a panicked call from my bank manager.
Newsflash to the inner-suburban types and their baristas named Fabrice, for whom coffee isn’t just a job – it’s a vocation. The coffee is undrinkable, just like in Sydney, Brisbane or elsewhere, no matter how much we congratulate ourselves for living in the southern hemisphere’s coffee capital (sorry Buenos Aires).
As for me – I now patronise the convenience stores and fast-food joints that offer $2 or $3 cups. The coffee is still terrible, but their reasonable prices are all that’s standing between Australian consumers and complete market failure.
High prices aren’t the byproduct of the scam – they’re central to the illusion. The unmooring of coffee prices from the value of the product reinforces the narrative.
We’ve all heard the justifications for the exorbitant prices: the skyrocketing cost of beans, rising rents, labour costs, milk-distribution cartels, the war in the Middle East. All of these factors apply in Italy as well – yet they charge just a few euros.
Italians respond to the reasonable prices by drinking more. This may take the form of standing at a café counter after lunch and slamming it down fast, or popping in for a quick afternoon pick-me-up. And they show up two or three times a day, every day of the week.
If I started to drink three coffees a day at an Australian cafe, I’d receive a panicked call from the AI program that has replaced my bank manager.
I don’t object to Melbourne and other Australian cities trying it on. As our sleeping provincial towns evolved into vibrant multicultural cities, we needed something catchy to replace the dark and dingy pubs of yesteryear.
We were right to celebrate our tentative steps away from the Nescafe nightmare of the 1950s. In so doing, we were already more advanced than, say, France, where the quality of the coffee has caused as much reputational damage as 30 years of South Pacific nuclear testing.
But the Australian café proselytisers believe their own hype. Where we should have invested time and effort into developing the product and importing the necessary expertise, we tried to talk our vision into existence.
I’m not above feeling some national pride for Australian coffee’s limited global success. I lived in Brussels for six years and adored the place. But with coffee, the bar was so low that Belgium actually benefited from the arrival of flat whites and magics.
But come on, people. Australia can do so much better.
This isn’t Coca-Cola’s “merchandise 7X” formula or the 11 herbs and spices locked up in KFC’s Louisville vault. It’s accessible information: a skill developed by a bunch of Italians with no artistic pretension and no hipster beards.
Given the urgency of the problem, the first step should be to print out a stack of 482 visas and get some real baristas on a plane to Australia.
The chances of that happening are, of course, zero. There’s too much riding on the coffee-capital-of-the-universe gambit for anyone to admit it was a ruse. But to those demanding that we ignore what our tastebuds are telling us, I say this: eppur si muove. And yet it moves.
James Panichi is a Melbourne journalist.
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James Panichi is a Melbourne-based journalist with MLex-LexisNexis; he has worked for Politico, the ABC and SBS.
