Starting the day with a post about coffee…
Mmmm, coffee. Just the thing to wake up on a Monday morning…
But whilst I’ve been trying to keep my morning coffee habits in check (it all adds up, after a while… £2 here, £2.40 there…), over the last few months I’ve become increasingly interested in a growing coffee phenomenon… the flat white
The flat what?
The flat white. As I understand it, it is a style of coffee that originated in New Zealand and/or Australia. I’m not going to get into the details of which, as no doubt I will ultimately annoy either Kiwis or Aussies, or both.
And the only annoying of Aussies I want to do today will be based on the Twenty20 cricket victory…
Anyway, back to the coffee.
Here’s how I ‘think’ you make a flat white… muddled together from things I’ve read, seen and heard…
You start off with a double espresso, in the bottom of quite a small
cup (especially compared to the monstrous ‘Venti’ buckets you get in
Starbucks and the like).
Then, the milk is frothed like it would be for a cappuccino, but the big frothy, foamy bubbles are either tipped into another jug or made to disappear by banging the jug and swirling it round… the aim being to get milk that contains very small bubbles which makes the milk a lot smoother in texture.
Finally, the milk is gently layered in on top of the coffee, so the end coffee to milk ratio is probably at most 1:2.
The end result is a very smooth, very strong and flavoursome coffee.
So where do you get ’em?
Yes, yes, too obvious… but it’s a great place to start…
I’d been to the eponymous soho café Flat White before with Mel, but alas we’d stuck resolutely to our frothy cappuccinos…
…it was only when I started wittering on about Flat Whites in the office that Aussie Kamilla pointed out that to have a proper flat white in London, you really needed to head down Berwick Street… so off we went.
Everything about Flat White says authentic, crafted, artisan coffee and food…
…and it’s the sort of place that’s becoming increasing common in cities across the UK.
Food writer Daniel Young writes here about how ‘London’s great coffee moment has come’ because of three things…
…the number of great baristas who’re serving good, tasty, strong coffee
…the increase in the number of London coffee shops who’re roasting their own beans
…and the growing trend for filter coffees (which of course is all about the coffee, not the milk).
The nation’s tastes in coffee are changing… and for the big chains, this causes a bit of an issue…
It used to be that the likes of Starbucks, Costa, Nero’s et al were seen as THE place to get a great coffee by the majority of the public…
…now for some folks, they’re becoming a bit too mainstream, too commonplace… the coffee house of last resort, when you can’t find anywhere better to go.
And so they’ve taken to aping the cool kids clothes, following the fashion, jumping on the flat white bandwagon…
Costa launched the Flat White in their range with a big PR campaign, and they even got nobody’s favourite Aussie, Peter Andre, to come along and stand near some stuff and gesture at it…
…it’s helped though; their sales went up 10%.
Starbucks, home of the milky coffee bucket, launched it at a similar time, and started putting their version of the Flat White front and centre on the board… look, we can do it too…
So, what does it all mean.
As Ted observed, the flat white seems to have gone from artisan to mainstream pretty quickly, though the coffee itself has been around in Australia ‘for ever’ as Kamilla put it, and the Flat White café on Berwick Street opened in 2005.
Has something happened in the last year specifically to push it into the mainstream?
Have sales at all coffee chains waned, and they’ve looked around for something new to talk about? Have our tastes become more discerning? Yes, probably.
But I wonder if there’s something compelling in the story itself… the artisan crafting of the flat white, the rebellion against common coffee wisdom, the secret places you can take people to to drink it…
…there’s as much rich texture in the story about the coffee as there is in the coffee itself.
Which is probably why I felt it was worth sharing with you…
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