Melbourne as a coffee Mecca??

I thought it was just "a good place for a village". But I guess I wouldn't know. I still make my coffee from Bushell's coffee & chicory essence so I am obviously in the sub-imbecile department as far as coffee goes. I mostly drink tea -- as all Australians once did. Some tea-drinkers are fighting back.

Frappuccinos may be too gauche for some tastes, but the coffee chain has its own reasons for retreating from the Australian market. SURELY, the critics said, it would be doomed from the start. With its trademarked frappuccinos and smorgasbord of syrup flavours, the day Starbucks came to Lygon Street was like Scientologists setting up in Vatican City. Sacrilegious. And now, with the American coffee giant announcing the closure of 61 Australian stores from tomorrow - 16 of them in Melbourne, including the Lygon Street venture - Australia's home of discerning coffee drinkers appears to have been vindicated.

"Melburnians would argue to their death that you can get a better coffee in Melbourne than anywhere else in Australia," says Andrew Brown-May, a senior lecturer in history at Melbourne University and author of a book on Melbourne's coffee past. "We've actually got, not just superficially but deep in our culture, a great knowledge and appreciation of coffee and certainly a mythology about it."

While mega-chains such as Starbucks, Gloria Jean's and Hudsons are relatively new additions, Brown-May argues that black gold has played an important role in Melbourne's social history for well over a century. In his entries on coffee and coffee palaces in the Encyclopedia of Melbourne, he retells the beginnings of Melbourne's coffee culture, traced back to the street stalls of the 1850s that offered caffeine hits to rushed city workers, then re-emerging as continental coffee houses in the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s.

By the 1950s, the influx of Italian migrants had helped redefine coffee for Melbourne once again, serving it up in espresso cups instead of percolators. Yet two of the key proponents of the espresso bar were father and son team Harry and Peter Bancroft, Anglo-Australians who in 1953 secured the rights to manufacture Gaggia coffee machines and set up a cafe in St Kilda. This act enabled enterprising migrants to open similar businesses (Carlton's University Cafe and Bourke Street's Pellegrini's among them) and maintain, in Brown-May's words, a time capsule of coffee tradition.

So, purists, you've won. The humble cappuccino has triumphed over its Orange-Mocha-Frappa cousin. The latter probably never stood a chance. Those of you who know your ristretto from your machiatto, may sip at your crema with increased joy. And for anyone who has ever railed against the bulldozing sameness of American culture, go ahead, smile a little more smugly over that karmic cup of fair trade, East Timorese organic roast.

But don't think the downsizing of Starbucks has been all thanks to you. The trimming down of the Seattle-based coffee goliath, not just in Australia but in the 600 stores to be closed in the United States, may not have entirely been a result of the anti-brand, anti-consumer revolution. Nor was it especially about coffee. "In the US they were new; there wasn't anybody else doing this. I think Australia has had a lot of cafes well established, so I think there was just more entrenched competition," Deakin University marketing professor Michael Polonsky says. "Any street in Melbourne you could get a good coffee, so (Starbucks) had to be substantially different." Starbucks had attempted the Coca-Cola strategy of being available wherever people looked, Polonsky says. But it was its market saturation that was its undoing.

Writing in The Christian Science Monitor, Temple University historian Bryant Smith argues that when Starbucks began, it offered Americans an entree into a status-filled world with is own language of ventis, grandes, Tazo teas and special-blend coffees, all stamped with the company's distinctive green logo. But by becoming too common - Starbucks first opened in Australia in 2000 and expanded to 84 stores in eight years - the company "violated the economic principles of cultural scarcity", Smith says. So the novelty just wore off.

But in a city steeped in coffee, and coffee of a particular preparation, Andrew Brown-May thinks it may also have to do with taste. "Starbucks coffee does taste different, and to many Australian palates has an over-roasted, almost burnt taste to it," he says. "And all the syrups and additives and so on, I think we're more sophisticated than that, actually." Snobs? Us? Never.

Source