Personal history of coffee, in an instant
When I was growing up in Perth in the 1940s and 50s almost everybody drank tea.
Anyone for coffee? When I was growing up in Perth in the 1940s and 50s almost everybody drank tea. Hardly anybody drank coffee. If they did it was a sickly sweet concoction that came out of a tall dark bottle labelled “chicory essence of coffee”. These bottles generally were stored in the back recesses of the kitchen pantry or kitchenette.
Yes, tea was the non-alcoholic drink of choice. Of course people had individual preferences. Some people drank only black tea. Others drank white tea without or without sugar. I was a white and two sugars tea drinker.
In the 60s I was travelling in a Greyhound bus from Mexico City to San Antonio, Texas. In conversation, the gentleman next to me noticed my Australian accent. “I spent three years in Australia,” he told me. “I was stationed at the US Navy Catalina Base at Crawley Bay in Perth. The Australians are great people, but they have a real funny way of drinking tea.”
“Oh,” I replied in mild amazement. What’s so funny about it?”
‘Well, they drank it hot, and with milk.”
Not long after that encounter I enjoyed a cup of tea in San Antonio. It was black tea, served with ice in a long glass with a slice of lemon. Very refreshing it was, too.
While we Aussies continued to drink our tea hot, with or without milk and sugar, the wave of European migrants in the 1950s saw an increase in the demand for coffee — real coffee, good coffee, not chicory essence. Espresso coffee machines arrived from Italy and soon people were asking for coffee in cafes and restaurants and in the many coffee lounges that began to spring up in downtown areas. In those days the legal drinking age in Perth was 21. So, after the library closed, my university mates and I used to spend hours in coffee lounges solving the world’s problems into the small hours of the morning.
My favourite coffee lounge was the Coffee Pot. It was owned by a Dutch couple who fled to Perth in February 1942 when the Japanese invaded Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies. In the Coffee Pot, in the late 50s, we drank black coffee, white coffee, vienna coffee and cappuccino coffee, accompanied by danish pastries, apple strudel and exotic spring rolls.
A great feature of the Coffee Pot was that the owners did not seem to mind that my student mates and I could order just one cup of coffee each, then sit there for hours and hours in deep and meaningful discussion. The owners possessed European charm, always had a friendly smile and did not hurry us in any way. We were just teenagers but they treated us as if we were grown-ups. And they played great jazz and swing music on a large radiogram set against one wall.
The Coffee Pot’s greatest feature, however, was the beautiful daughter of the proprietors who waited on the tables. She was in her early 20s and looked like French actress Juliette Greco.
Since then, of course, coffee has overtaken tea as Australia’s non-alcoholic beverage of choice. It is so popular that people walk the city streets sipping it from large cardboard cups. We even have TAFE courses where would-be baristas develop their coffee-making skills, learning to put creative shapes and patterns — latte art — on top of the crema.
And we are overburdened with choice when it comes to ordering coffee. We can have long black, short black, macchiato, decaf, double decaf, espresso, cappuccino, vienna, latte, skinny latte in regular cups, large cups or pots. Recently a friend of mine ordered a skinny large cappuccino, which sounds like a contradiction in terms.
Still, some things never change. A couple of years ago my wife and I were driving back to Perth from Brisbane. On the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia we left our hotel at Ellerston quite early, planning on grabbing a coffee somewhere along the road before we hit Ceduna. After a while we arrived at Port Kenny, which consisted of a general store, a water tank and a couple of petrol bowsers. Inside the shop a friendly lady smiled and asked me how she could help. “I’d like two coffees,” I replied.
“And what sort of coffee would you like?” she said as she turned to walk towards the hot water urn at one end of the counter.
“I’d like a skinny latte for my wife and a large cappuccino for myself.”
Slowly the lady turned and with a charming smile said, “Sir, this is Port Kenny, not Collins Street. You can have white coffee or black coffee.”
We drove away from Port Kenny with two white coffees made with instant coffee. The funny thing is they tasted just as good as some of the more expensive coffees made with the real thing.