You'd Like a Flat What?

By guest blogger Mark


The kiwis have invented a variation on the myriad of coffee drinks that have become popular in the last few decades. They call it a “flat white”, and it’s been a source of amusement to us for, well, several years now...

Starbucks aren’t nearly as popular here as they are in the States, but virtually every place that a traveller might stop, as well as absolutely every single tearoom, café, bar and restaurant, has an “espresso machine” and offers a large variety of coffee-based drinks. There are some straight translations for a few of the coffee drinks, such as “short black” for espresso, and “drip coffee” for our standard automatic drip coffee, but many of the names mean something different, and/or are used inconsistently. The very best example of this, which has come to be a running joke for Brigid and me, is the difference between a latte and a “flat white”. Every coffee place will offer both (with the latte usually being about 50 cents more expensive), and they both have some amount of coffee or espresso, some amount of steamed milk, and some amount of foam, but that’s where the agreement ends. We’ve made a game of always asking “What’s the difference between a latte and a flat white?”, even though we know in advance that the answer will always be different from the previous explanation, and it will likely be confusing, illogical, and/or just plain wrong. For example, here’s one of our favorite answers, which we wrote down right after we heard it because it was just so, well, perfect: “We make our lattes with 2 shots and our flat whites with only one, and our flat whites have more steamed milk, so the latte isn’t as strong. And our flat whites have more foam since they’re served in a bowl instead of a cup, unless you order it takeaway [to go], in which case the latte comes in a larger paper cup and thus has more foam and is stronger.” It would be a great exercise for a maths class in combinatorics to analyze just how many permutations there are given the possible number of shots; more or less steamed milk; more or less foam; and cup or bowl, or tall, grande or venti takeaway cups. (And then you’d have to square that number since there’s about a 0% chance that the barista will have the same understanding that the sales clerk does...)

Actually, there is one answer that we found really amusing that sums it all up pretty well: “About 50 cents. They’re really the same thing, but the tourists always order the latte so we charge more for that.”

And now that we know all of this, you’d think we’d be frugal and always order flat whites, But it’s just too darned amusing asking what the difference is and then ordering one of each.