Alright so I just churned this out to express some thoughts to a friend about cheap shitty coffee. I’ve been reading On The Road for an essay I’m working on and it struck me as to how American the book is, and then I started thinking about shitty coffee and I messaged my friend, and he said something, and then I told him I’d give my thoughts and rambled out the lengthy below, which I might turn into an essay with proper editing and all that. Really work on my thoughts into something a bit more tangible.

Decided I’d post it here though because it has something that I feel is worth thinking about.

I hope you enjoy.

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You know, there’s something about a cheap and shitty coffee that’s affordable, and perhaps much more appreciable, if not in the moment but rather in retrospect, than a good coffee that’s pricey.

I’m somewhat nomadic. Sure, I’ve a home base and, due to how expensive it actually is to go anywhere, stuck there more often than I’d like, and thus limited to driving up to a few hours away from Sydney, but I love being able to move. I love being able to travel and get away and the sense of space and isolation that can come with it. I love getting up at horrible hours and going, and the silence of being away from the city and continuing to move.

I love traveling, essentially, and whilst I prefer a comfy bed, I’m not averse to sleeping in the boot.

But you know, you get up early, you find somewhere to eat, you get a coffee if that’s your thing. But the coffee is more expensive than it used to be and you’re wondering why, and there’s some pretension of artisanal bullshit going on but it’s just a coffee. Sure, you’re perched at a table getting some rest, but you’re also on the move. You don’t want to necessarily be sitting there, pondering darkness.

The last time I had a cheap shitty coffee was back in 2018. I was in Melbourne with my partner, and one of the last places we had breakfast in was this café that seemed more like one of those truck stop diners you used to occasionally find along a highway in NSW. You probably still do if you go far enough, or at least far away enough from a highway. This was near the heart of the city, and it felt like truck stop food and coffee, or at least what I perceive as being that, and it wasn’t great. It wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but the coffee, at least, was not great. But it was affordable. It did what it needed to. We ate, we drank, we left.

Shortly after getting my red P’s (about two-and-a-half weeks after) I drove down to Melbourne via Wollongong and The Hume. Wollongong to meet up with the person I co-run Culture Eater with, and it added some time, but it was nice. Made my way to The Hume after, drove along. No diners unless I wanted to take a detour, and that was not something I wanted to do, so the only other options were the developed rest areas with service stations and food places that seem more like a trap than a place to rest. I didn’t risk it; I think I got some food at one in the late afternoon, and stocked up on snacks at one earlier in the day, but I’ve been to enough to know that what they provide is not great. It’s acceptable for the road, but it always feels like a plastic representation of something genuine. A pale imitation of the roughness that seems to sit much better.

It was roughly the same for the trip back, though I did get coffee at some point and it wasn’t great and it was overpriced. An unpleasant experience.

Coffee has become such a widespread thing over a long, long time, but getting a good coffee still remains difficult. Getting a good coffee at a reasonable price more so. I spend a lot of time in Newtown, and getting something good here feels like a gamble. You spend a lot of money and then try to convince yourself that this overly milky thing you’re drinking is good, because you’ve spent a lot of money on it so it has to be good. It cannot be bad. But finding a café in Newtown that does good coffee, let alone good coffee at a reasonable price, is a shot in the dark. A suburb does not mean coffee is good; it just is a suburb, and coffee might be there.

On some of my trips out to Bathurst, and just the mountains in general, it has become difficult to get a shitty coffee at a good price. There were places, but slowly as the suburban culture has crept its spindly tendrils into areas to forcibly change what they were, the quality of coffee has kind of increased in some areas to something that’s generally decent, but the prices have also gone up. Yeah, great, but I don’t want to go on this journey to have breakfast. I want to go on this journey to travel. I know I know, people visit areas and all that, they need to be catered to, but some of it feels inauthentic in a way, and maybe it’s the price. It’s difficult to get shitty coffee at a reasonable price in Bathurst too.

So why a shitty coffee anyway, other than what I’ve said? They’re awful in the moment, but you get one that’s affordable, as in reasonably priced, and what are you going to do? Complain? A shitty, affordable coffee is a good coffee, and generally much better than a good coffee because it does exactly what it needs to. You go into a place that serves shitty coffee; you don’t get to complain about it. The purpose is not flavourful experience, though it certainly is that; it’s to have a coffee that’ll keep you caffeinated, to jolt you awake if necessary as the first pang of bitterness caresses your taste buds. It’s there to give you some time to plan your trip out, to see where you go and keep you going. It’s purposeful, and if it’s cheap, it’s better. You sit down, you have it, you leave. Maybe you take it with you and leave, though it might be better to sit, just in case it works your insides too well.

But the cheap and shitty coffee is a dying breed, and as the travel along the road changes into something more artificial it becomes a forgotten part of history. As coffee culture changes and shuns the shitty coffee for something pricier and no less shitty, the honesty of the cheap and shitty one is lost to a truth that’s self-delusion.