February 2010

The "Flat White," London's and New Zealand's Favorite Espresso Drink

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Via Metafilter today comes word of a new espresso drink which has taken the city of London by storm.  The "Flat White," which was reportedly developed in New Zealand (or perhaps Australia - but trust me, it's best to stand back and let the two of them duke it out) and quickly became popular in damp dreary London.

The Flat White can best be understood by the American audience as a double short no-foam latte.  It begins with two shots of espresso pulled ristretto - short - in order to maximize flavor while minimizing bitterness.  There are three ways to pull a ristretto shot:

1.    Grind the beans more finely, and pull a normal amount of water through them.  Since the water has less contact with the finer grinds, it will extract less bitterness from them.

Beef Alert: Starbucks Cap vs Latte

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I am an avid coffee drinker. Espresso to be exact. And I like to mix it up, sometimes a mocha, sometimes a cappuccino and sometimes a 'mochaccino'. I'll even have a cup of joe from time to time when the mood strikes. But I got BEEF with Starbucks.

I have had cappuccinos in Paris, Rome, New York and San Francisco. And as long as I got those in a restaurant or cafe they were pretty much served alike. A shot of Espresso and about equal parts milk and foam. In my mind, the milk shouldn't outweigh the espresso and the foam should fill the bulk of the cup.

Maui Coffee

I confess that, after living in Washington for a little over a year, I've not yet really sampled the local coffee culture. I know, it's inexcusable, particularly since I'm exceedingly fond of coffee. I don't really have an excuse. I want to experience the full panoply of Washington's fine coffee emporiums and roasters, I really do. There's just one small problem. You see, long ago, I discovered Hawaiian coffee, and fell deeply in love with it. Not just the Kona brew you hear so much—but coffee from Kaanaipali, in Maui, or Kauai or Molokai. You don't hear much about Hawaiian coffee except for Kona, and honestly, most of the state-side Kona if you check the label is actually something like 10%, with the rest made up of Arabica.

Coffee Productions

I am surrounded by coffee kiosks. I customarily pass five or six coffeehouses a day, some with custom small-batch

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roasts, in an effort to go anywhere at all. Even the local grocery stores carry the beans produced by local roasters. The local climate is pro-coffee, to the extent that you have to hunt for the segregated tea sections in local grocery stores. Ordering coffee here is an art in and of itself, worthy of the mockery of coffee house trendiness in L. A. Story. Americano, cappuccino, mocha, expresso, latte, soy latte, half-caf, macchiato—it's complicated. Don't ask me to explain the decaf espresso crowd; I can't.

Coffee Origins

Coffee in terms of the ur-bean, if you will, of the species Coffea arabica, is native to tropical Africa,

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in the region known today as Ethiopia, and is in the same family Rubiaceae as the gardenia. Your basic coffee bean traveled, in the space of a little under seven hundred years, from tropical Africa to the courts and markets of Europe. Roughly a thousand years ago, c. 1000 CE, coffee was brought from Africa to Arabia. Coffee addiction and the love of the bean spread with the spread of Islam, and thus coffee was spread to North Africa, the eastern(and Islamic) half of the Mediterranean, and India. Arabia, no slouch when it came to international trade, protected their coffee monopoly by boiling or roasting beans before export, thus rendering them infertile, and insuring repeat customers.