It’s pretty hard to not be a coffee snob living in Melbourne. This is a city where you get a funny look if you order a decaf latte or god forbid a decaf soy (Tash), where baristas are deemed to be uber cool and the local newspaper has a hotly contested top 50 coffee shop guide. I didn’t give a shit about coffee until I moved there and slowly it just turned me into this caffeine hunting fiend in search of the perfect flat white. Damn you Melbourne, damn you!

So what does one do when they leave this land of the perfect micro foam? Bitch about it, have withdrawals and ultimately succumb to the strange new land of ordering a coffee in America. The coffee overall is turd but there is something alluring about it, with the thousands of different combos that keeps me coming back for more. It’s my dad’s idea of coffee heaven, large portions hotter than the sun with the taste of bark.

There is good coffee out there but there always seemed to be an Aussie or Kiwi lurking in the background, like Astro Coffee in Detroit. The Canadians had it going on with plenty of quality. It’s when you get on the road and are hauling ass between cities with long hours in the car that you inevitably have to stop at gas station. I love gas stations, there are so many different ones, even state specific brands and you soon develop a love for a certain one. Take Sheetz which is located in the North East states. They must have had about 10 different types of drip coffee, I reckon they all tasted the same but they had signs urging you to try different combos and add pre-mixed cappuccinos from the machine, equally as terrible as expected. I took a shining to the flavoured creamer though, Irish cream in all its sugary goodness. Surely the US is heading for a diabetes epidemic soon enough.

Don’t forget the size, of course its American sized so for an extra 10 cents you can get the super large so it’s extra nervy twitchy driving for the next hour followed by another stop due to said coffee’s effects on the bladder.

And then there’s the coffee chains, here’s looking at you Tim Hortons, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. Fuck me they are shit and you know it, yet still you end up there paying way too much for your milky bucket of coffee. I couldn’t quite grasp the lingo either, a double double gets you double milk and double sugar but some people have some crazy stuff going down. Needless to say I got the wrong thing often but by accidentally ending up with an iced coffee I became hooked on them while in NYC. And another thing, don’t try and replicate things you love at home, like a cappuccino. Getting the waiter to add the chocolate sprinkles to the coffee sounds like an easy thing, turns out you get some crappy chocolate they use for making mochas and it’s gluggafied your coffee.

So it probably sounds like I’m hating on the American coffee a bit but I actually kinda grew to love the different way they go about it, it serves a purpose. To serve you a mega sized caffeine hit at a decent price and you just know thats it’s going to be average, can’t really complain for $1.70. It also makes the flat white you have come across at some random spot all the better.

Sincerely

J drip coffee (brewed fresh in the last 20 minutes) convert