Coffee: The drug that fuels the world

Making coffee was my first real hospo gig.

3 days out the front, on coffee, and two days out the back.

I didn’t have the lingo to work out the front, or deal with the many corporates that would come through ‘Rivers run cafe’ at Pier 35, on fisherman’s bend, in Melbourne.

You could hire a yacht space for about 30k a week, I think from memory, back in 2000.

My step sisters boyfriend had t’ed up my job, who was the assistant manager of the building. Big Julza 🤘

After a short while, I got permanently banished to the kitchen, but not before I picked up an appetite, and the skill set, to turn out lattes and big top cappacinos.

My only experience with coffee until that point was either Nescafes blend 43, or the Big Bushels dark roast.

Most dry roasts are absolutely shite. In comparison to espresso anyways. Mocona is my stable, at home, as an easy way to a caffeine fix.

The really annoying thing I used to find about making coffee, aside from copping the brunt of people’s day to day aggression, was making the old school ‘big top’ cappuccino.

A latte was to hold a set shot of coffee, with milk, and roughly a centimeter of crema style foam at the top. A good crema will stick to the side of your cup once it has been consumed I was taught was the way to a perfect latte.

In comparison to a cappuccino though, you needed a large, protruding bulge of foam that stuck out over the top of the cup.

The bigger the better they taught me. Yet you needed two different milk bases to get yourself there. One pot of froff for the cappuccino, and one pot of crema for the lattes and flat whites. Then make that double, too, as you had to put it up for the light milk, watered-down version also.

These days though, you just cant get big top cappacinos. Not in my home town of Launceston anyways.

Cappuccino is simply a flat white with chocolate on top in the 2020s. A flat white back in those days was really just a latte in a mug, or the sort of thing the ‘plain Jane’s’ wanted to order as they didn’t wanna seem like too much of a yuppy (my dad called me a yuppy once for ordering a latte, the old fart 🖕).

I have recently asked around a few coffee statesman and women to see why we have moved away from such big top standards.

Is it modern entitlement? Is it to hard to juggle multiple jobs, or froffs, for the up and comers to handle when the pressure gouge is turned up?

Is it the 17 or so different milk varieties the coffee shops need to have on the ready for the endless faddy diets and/or health requirements of customers?

I decided to find out anyway…

I asked a reputable cafe/restaurant manager that I pass by from time to time. He was quick to blame the ‘woke movement’. I think he must have got a rip from someone recently, as he’s a smarter dude than that. From what I can see from afar, the ‘woke movement’ is a vengeance/vigilante group that picks easy targets, so I am not real sure those guys could affect such change.

I asked my local coffee place, and I even got them to make me a cappuccino. I specifically asked for a big foam, too. I did receive one with a smaller foam head than what I would have presented back in the day.

To his credit, though, the big gun, it was f@#king delicious. For the first time ever I actually sat down and spooned my chocolate coated foam into my face. Aerated, chocolate bliss it was.

Yet, as good as the first couple of pro tips I had received were, my question was still yet to be answered.

So there only one thing I could do, which was to ask my local chit-chat group to see if they could enlighten me. With passionate feedback and a good poll with hopefully a decent answer to my question.

Why don’t baristas do a big foam on cappuccinos anymore?

I set up 2 polls. One in ‘Launceston chit chat’, and one in ‘the not shit guide to Tasmania’.

Launceston chit-chat is always good for getting a rise out of locals. The majority of the vote went to ‘no one cares’ (48%, 98 votes).

I gave the audience six or so options to choose from, yet left voting options open to people in order to gain potential extra insight into peoples lack of love for froff.

Below are some peoples responses, with my feedback.

Next up was the Not shit guide to Launceston…

As per the Launceston chit chat page, no one really cares, but a fair bit of the vote did go too soft generation.

I care, so stuff them. And every generation gets called soft by the generation they are following through.

Let’s check out the feedback from ‘the not shit guide to Tasmania response to my queries …

The are your choices, and here is the personal feedbacks….

I have to say asking my local, everyday people irrelivant, but serious questions like that is so much fun, and insightful. So many passionate people about in my great home town.

Overall though, I never really found out why no one does the ‘big top’ capaccino anymore.

From a historical perspective, coffee has played a HUGE role in society. In Launceston, or Australia, or world wide.

According to one legend, some dude in Ethiopia around the 800s AD, wondered why his goats started acting crazy after eating a certain type of berry in a region called Kaffe, so he tried a few himself.

After getting a good buzz from these beans, he started to spread the word.

Around the 1500s, the plants started being cultivated in southern Yemen.

Cafe’s in general started becoming popular in the 1500s in Mecca, and Constantinople in the 1600s.

In Australia, coffee was first planted upon arrival with some of the first settlement fleets, in 1788, yet it took a fair while for it to become the staple drink it is today, as tea was the prominent warm drink consumed by our British, colonial ancestors.

Coffee generates a whopping 93.2 billion dollars world wide. Click here for more coffee statistics.

Crema, with your coffee though, is the big thing. It isn’t the throff, it isn’t the chocolate sprinkles Australian barristas put on our cappacinos that nowhere else in the world does!

It’s the f#@king crema baby.

Crema is the minuscule air bubbles that form on the juices of your freshly pressed coffee juice.

Be it on your flat white, short black or whatever your coffee vice is. If you want the best coffee, you better take care of the crema.

Here’s a small link to a few journals on the subject –

Crema—Formation, Stabilization, and Sensation

Impact of crema on the aroma release and the in-mouth sensory perception of espresso coffee

Here are a few of Tasmania local coffee roasters, as follows-

Tasmanian coffee roasters

Cheeky devil coffee

Ritual coffee

I used the ritual guys to brew my coffee for this blog, you can check out Moka pot coffee at home below.

I don’t think big top cappuccinos were ever a thing now I have undertaken this research. It was most probably just the social niche I was involved with in my early days of hospitality life.

Us Australians are the only culture in the world that enjoy cappuccinos with chocolate sprinkles I found out too.

I had originally thought the reason for the lack of froff was all the different milk types.

One cool thing I found out, though, was that people in Rome enjoy coffee with moritozzo, a cream filled brioche bun, especially as a courtship maneuver.

Check out my attempt at home-made big top coffee here too.

I hope you enjoyed my story.