The coffee goes in last to preserve the crema, the brownish foam that coffee snobs fetishise, but the lure is supposed to be its taste: if an americano can be innocuous – like diner coffee, only pricier – a long black is meant to give the drinker a decent blast of bean.
Taste aside, though, coffee is a duller, safer thing now than in the past, however much we believe its more unusual or ascetic variants signal our coolness (the drinker of a long black may be the kind of person who 40 years ago would have signalled their style by smoking Gitanes … in Birmingham).
Many of us grew up with coffee made by pouring hot water over grounds in a cone, drip-drip style, straight into the cup, and if you go into a truly hip coffee shop now, you’ll see this method is once again the ne plus ultra when it comes to caffeine (Zen patience is an important element of the experience).
The big news in coffee right now is the long black, which also has its origins in Australia or New Zealand.
As every serious drinker of coffee surely knows, the search for the perfect cup is like the search for the perfect lipstick: a quest that will end only with death.
