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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

Most people don't encounter enough Australians to know this, but the #1 way to identify an Australian is their absurd patriotic complex about how they're the only country with good coffee. This universally comes with insulting Starbucks, which is the only non-Australian coffee they seem to know about.

It's true that Melbourne does have good coffee, but the city is basically an accidental reinvention of Seattle. But they don't know this since they haven't been to Seattle.

Generally I feel like people in the coffee production chain give too much credit to James Hoffman types and/or baristas with man buns and not any credit to the actual farmers.

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Australia/NZ was the only place with good coffee a long time ago but that ship has sailed, you can get great coffee everywhere. Also I am not so much bashing starbucks as using it as a yardstick to say a machine can make good coffee from fresh beans, which I find amazing

True. As a matter of fact, almost all coffee making involves machines, at least when we're talking about the espresso variety. For years, fully automatic coffee makers have been a big trend even in consumer electronics, i.e., lots of homes have machines sitting on their counter top that make all kinds of coffees at the push of a button. Why shouldn't a vending machine be able to do the same...

As a Melburnian, I can second that Melbourne is coffee-obsessed, and Starbucks is a step up your average takeaway shop coffee.

With that said, there’s a very discernible difference in quality between a decent cafe coffee and a Starbucks coffee.

My heuristic is the size of the small takeaway cup. If the small size is 8oz, it’s almost a certainly going to be average.

I've met many Australians, and have not experienced what you describe. If anything, coffee culture is a Melbourne thing, with Brisbane being en par. I have not heard of, say, Perth being especially known for their association with coffee drinking.

As far as I know, it is thanks to immigrants from Italy that an admittedly good and wide-spread coffee culture has established in Melbourne, but I never felt that it stood out in how Australians perceive themselves.

> I have not heard of, say, Perth being especially known for their association with coffee drinking.

Not Perth (the capital city) no .. but definitely Northbridge (suburb slightly north of the city centre) and Fremantle (port | harbour 'city' down river from Perth) beacuse they've been Italian strongholds for decades.

Both were known for coffee in the early 1980s.

Ironically, I think Perth has better coffee on average than Melbourne.

Sydney has coffee culture both in the city and in the burb. There be brick walls, long queues, single Os, beards, baggy clothes, Timemore scales and hairbuns closer to you than a rat in London.

In addition to hipsterism there is ubiquity: baristas in petrol stations, swimming pools, dog parks, the beach, the pub, everywhere!

"Reinvention" my dude it's the other way around, espresso was big in Melbourne before it ever hit Seattle.

Third wave coffee isn't mainly about espresso in the US, that seems to be an Italian (and Australian) thing.

Of course, the US has always had plenty of Italians - specifically in SF and NYC, where the rich ones gave us Nancy Pelosi and high end grocery stores, while the poor ones gave us all those mafia movies. I'm not sure if Seattle's coffee shops came from them; I always assumed it was just because the weather made everyone depressed.

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