The flat white is under attack. Or at least according to one Guardian contributor. The aggressor? Milk. More milk. Flat whites apparently now come, confusingly to some, in two sizes—small and large—which some see as a grave offense to the hallowed Antipodean espresso drink.
To which I say, “You must be new here.”
The story appears as part of the Guardian’s Petty Gripes series, and revolves around the central claim that “a large flat white is an oxymoron—a bastardization of the drink Australia gave the world.” [Editor’s note: it didn’t.] Of course, size confusion among espresso-based milk drinks is far from a new phenomenon. Cappuccinos, lattes, cortados most recently, all have strayed from their original definition. The macchiato has flummoxed entire generations of baristas at this point. It’s happening to the flat white now too.
Except there is one tiny little difference between the flat white and the other drinks listed. What makes the flat white different is that there is no agreed upon definition of the flat white. Even among Australians, who spread it around the world, and New Zealanders, who in actually invented it. We know because we asked thousands and thousands of them all about over a decade ago, when arguing about flat whites still seemed novel. The closest thing to agreement we could find in our survey was that the flatty was “small-ish”. Think of it like a small latte. Further confounding things was the lack of consensus on whether a flit whoite had a double shot of espresso or a single. Ratios here are just as important, if not more, than total drink size, so that’s not ideal.
(Here’s a parenthetical thought experiment for you: if you took two cappuccinos and somehow combined them into a single drink, what would you call it? Would you call it two drinks, which it no longer is? Is it a cappuccino, despite not meeting the size definition? Or would it be a latte, even though the ratios are all wonky? It’s a real Ship of Theseus situation.)
Thus the railing about a drink with no defined volume coming in multiple size options is non-sensical, which is fine, actually. I can certainly commiserate with the urge to soapbox over a perceived slight; sometimes as a writer, you gotta get your wiggles out, even if this particular writer did it in the most maximally Australian-gone-to-London way imaginable, which is by arguing over flat whites in The Guardian. The larger issue here is how the article talks about all the other drinks. More milk “dilutes”, it “bastardizes”, blah blah blah etc etc. There’s a funny line in the story about “what makes this worse is that many people claim to have a forensic, borderline scientific understanding of coffee, but press them slightly and you’ll find their knowledge is weak (much like their coffee, no doubt!).” Funny because the call is coming from inside the house.
But it’s also telling, the “weak” coffee part. A coffee drink becomes “weak” when you add more milk to it, meaning before that, it was “strong”. The terms here are used normatively; weak is bad, from which we can reasonable assume that “strong” is good. What’s happening is that the goalposts are getting moved such that the author’s preferred drink maintains the vaunted status of “strong” while its milkier counterparts fall short.
And listen, I love pretty much all milk and espresso drinks. They are an iconic pair at just about any ratio. Thus it stands to reason that I’d probably also love a flat white, assuming anyone could piece together what one actually is. But to imply that it is a “strong” drink is laughable. It’s simply not. It’s a nice warm milk with coffee undertones. Which again, is fucking delicious, full stop. Not strong, though.
Another point I take umbrage with here is the assertion that “if the amount of people ordering an ‘iced cappuccino’ (as happened at least once a day during summer months) tells us anything, it’s that most people have no idea what they really want at all.” The whole attitude about it sucks and smacks of the arrogance of, what was it, someone with “a forensic, borderline scientific understanding of coffee.” It’s also 100% the wrong takeaway. What it sounds like is that people know exactly what sort of drink they want but lack the lexicon to communicate it. Perhaps because the flat white was never really defined to begin with or because certain global coffee chains select already extant coffee words to represent unrelated drinks. Wherever the confusion is, it most certainly does not lie within the customer’s understanding of what they want.
Then there’s some drink shaming thrown in, about people who order large flat whites instead of “a milky latte” because they are “too afraid to admit that’s what they really want.” Which is an insane idea that can only be made by applying that same sort of normative hierarchy to the pantheon of milk drinks. Made further insane by the idea that, even according to its own scale, a small flat white isn’t somehow viewed as an embarrassing order. But that’s just where the goalposts have not at all arbitrarily been placed.
So if that’s the tack we are going to take, let us be crystal clear here: when you order a flat white all you really want is a small latte with a cheeky name.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
