Getting hot coffee and tea out of a vending machine when it’s cold out is one of the best experiences of visiting Japan. Particularly since the machines are everywhere.
Yes! I was first introduced to this during a cold January while having to stand watch in the port (ex-U.S. Navy). The highlight of my morning was that warm can dropping down and warming up my hands for the next ~30 minutes.
In Australia they are making barista coffee machines that make reasonable good Lattes! (and definitely better than starbuccks). I think it was Coles “Urban Coffee”. Not as amazing as a light roast single O from a coffee obsessed cafe. But better than a lot of coffee shops!
I'm going against the grain here but I don't really subscribe to the starbucks bashing that seems to be a common sport. I don't go to Starbucks very often at all, mostly at airports, but in all honesty I find there's nothing wrong with it. As in: I've had hand-crafted coffees made by no-nonsense barristas with man buns in the most artisan brick-walled coffee shops that you can think of and I didn't think they were a lot better.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a purist though. But then again, probably most people aren't.
Let's not forget what you average cup of coffee was like in America before Starbucks came along.
It's fine to just like what you like! There's nothing wrong with being happy with Starbucks. And yes, Starbucks deserves a lot of credit for promoting an interest in better quality coffee.
But a lot of what has attracted Starbucks' huge audience has been their very milky, sweetened, flavoured beverages that end up not being much of a coffee by the time they're consumed, and I think when people scoff at Starbucks, that's a big part of what they're reacting to. But I do think people who just have very milky coffee like cafe latte and flat white but then diss Starbucks are mostly just being snobbish.
I'm from Melbourne Australia, which several people in this thread have commented about, and I know what people are talking about, both those who talk about the good coffee here and those who talk about the superiority complex we have developed about it. I can see it both ways. Starbucks didn't take off here, not because people thought it was "bad"; we just didn't need it, as people already had favourite cafes serving coffee they really liked, so there was no need to change.
But the modern-day, 3rd-wave coffee snobbery thing arose a few years after that. On the one hand, like everything Melbourne claims to be better at, it can be a bit eye-rolly. On the other hand, my favourite coffee these days is long macchiato (I developed the taste for it when spending time in Italy and marrying into an Italian-Australian family), and even in Melbourne it can be hit-and-miss finding a cafe that does a long-mac "right"; I don't mean to be snobby about it, it's just about how I like it having developed a taste for it over several years. But it does make a difference that cafes here do try very hard to achieve very high standards in the coffee they serve, and people here really appreciate it.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
These are outdoor roadside vending machines, sometimes out in the middle of nowhere (or at least, not near any convenience stores). Driving down a quiet rural road on a cold morning and stopping for a hot coffee in a can is a nice break.
