Friday, February 19, 2010

Clothes-Peg Latte


As mentioned in my previous blog, I arrived in my new home town of Lismore, northern NSW, after a 3 month road trip around the western half of Australia - a terrifying prospect for one so reliant on her daily shot of quality espresso. A coffee plunger that came with our rented camper van was not going to satisfy my yen for a real espresso, and so my journey involved the daily search, accompanied by my long suffering latte companion, for a decent caffe latte.

As we pulled out of Alice Springs, where I had indulged in many good lattes, my anxiety levels increased. However, to my delight, our first stop a couple of hours north of Alice at a road side cafe/gallery served up a reasonable Lavazza espresso coffee!! I often find it safer to go for a flat white when ordering in such dangerous territory as a latte here is surely going to be of the parfait glass variety. (see my earlier blog on the parfait latte) On our trip I discovered the odd decent latte in the most unlikely places such as a tiny mining town in the middle of the desert in WA.

The majority of my caffe latte experiences,however, were either disappointing or absolutely mind-blowing. One that will always stand out was in Kununurra in the Kimberley where I experienced the amazing Clothes-Peg Latte. This insipid and over-heated latte came served with a cloth serviette strapped around its middle and clamped together by a clothes-peg. It was an awkward operation to sip this latte with its wooden protrusion and, combined with the appalling taste of the milky substance within, this was a truly horrendous yet unforgettable WA latte experience.