Flat whites or long blacks? What our changing coffee tastes say about us
When a man called Jacob opened what’s thought to be the first British coffee house in Oxford in 1650, he cannot possibly have known what he was starting. Then, as now, coffee was fashionable. In France, which had beaten Britain in the race to bring the drink to western Europe, people were dazzled by the Turkish ambassador’s parties, at which he once served Isaac D’Israeli, father of Benjamin, “the choicest Mocha coffee in tiny cups of egg-shell porcelain”. Perhaps Jacob hoped this glamour would rub off on the Angel Coaching Inn (admission: one penny).
But coffee was then still a quite basic thing: fragrant, maybe, but incredibly bitter. It was a matter of one size fits all (and absolutely no caramel syrup). The only faux pas a person could commit in its vicinity was to grimace too vigorously on tasting it, a gaucherie grand ladies were able quickly to conceal with the careful deployment of their fans.
Cut to 2025, when fans are only for the Hades-like depths of the London Underground in high summer. If coffee is now ubiquitous thanks to the domination of the high street chains, drinking it has become something of a social minefield, at least for those who care about personal branding.
Not so long ago, it was, after all, acceptable to order a cappuccino or a latte in the afternoon – unless you’re Italian and know that coffee with milk is only ever to be consumed at breakfast (or by big babies).
But in 2005, or thereabouts, the flat white, which has a higher proportion of espresso than a latte and less froth than a cappuccino, arrived on these shores from – no one seems sure – Australia or New Zealand. Suddenly, consumers began to disdain lattes and cappuccinos, to the point where even Starbucks and Costa got the message (both sell flat whites, though aficionados probably prefer not to think about this).
To every caffeinated beverage, however, there is a season, and at the hipper end of the market, the flat white’s may be cooling. The big news in coffee right now is the long black, which also has its origins in Australia or New Zealand. In 2023, it was London’s fifth most popular coffee order, accounting for 9% of sales; it has also been seen in the wild in Bristol, Edinburgh and Leeds. By this time next year, then, it will surely have been adopted by your local independent coffee shop, wherever you happen to live, and the year after that, by Caffè Nero et al. With a fair wind, it should be available in cans in supermarket chiller cabinets by 2028 at the latest, which means, basically, that the window for early adoption is already long past, and maybe you don’t need to abandon your flat white after all. (Be retro, and be proud.)
What is a long black? Its name makes no sense, because while it’s undoubtedly black, it’s shorter than an americano. Baristas make it by pouring an espresso into hot water, to fill a cup that would ordinarily hold a flat white (about 120ml). 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. I’m not sure it’s anything special, though I think I understand the impulse behind it. 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.
In general, coffee trends in Britain are very back-to-the-future, and hardly new at all; the long black is merely a speedy variation on this theme. 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). It tastes better than either an americano or a long black, but doesn’t suit the morning rush hour, or work for a long queue of impatient addicts.
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). A rich mythology, comprising dancing goats and sleepy monks, grew around the discovery of the coffee plant in Arabia (it was first mentioned as a drink in the 10th century, but cultivation probably began centuries earlier). In The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson suggests that when the practice of roasting beans began in the 13th century in Yemen, it was known as Qahwah, originally a poetic name for wine. Thereafter it was often seen as subversive: a threat to religious life that would leave mosques and churches alike empty.
In 2025, by contrast, its revolutionary qualities are somewhat limited. Chains may be boycotted, indies may refuse to serve it in disposable cups, and domestic consumers may pay more for fair trade. But otherwise it’s basically as cosy and as orthodox as, well, English breakfast tea.
