I've been on the road for a month recently up and down the east coast from Melbourne to Bellingen and back again (ok it was a family holiday but we still covered a lot of ground) - and whilst I picked and chose my coffee destinations along the way I was pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion by how much our collective coffee culture has grown and improved over the last little while it seems to me that national coffee standards are on the rise, and with the economic outlook still pretty gloomy, punters have every right to be discerning about how and where they spend their coffee dollar So was the coffee that I had in some unexpected destinations amazing? No, but it was good and of a very acceptable standard without obvious fault - good enough to warrant another cuppa more often than not Of course I will stand by the sidelines and watch how a barista makes their coffee and or check out the quality of the product being served and or access the general level of customer satisfaction before I order, and most places I wouldn't even bother because at a glance they have failed to meet some if not all of the above criteria - but, and this is a big but, in some of the little out of the way towns that we stopped at we did manage to find good and perfectly acceptable coffee, which I'm sure would not have been the case even several years ago
