A nice cup of coffee before you go?

Why have Britons taken so long to enjoy good coffee?

“That smells good. How do you make it?”

I poured. “French drip. Coarse ground coffee. No filter papers.”

Clipped but emphatic, this exchange establishes the basic equilibrium between Detective-Lieutenant Randall and Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s estimable novel of 1940, Farewell, my lovely. For Chandler, love of coffee drove honest Los Angeles cop and seedy Los Angeles private detective alike – made, indeed, the former divulge much of the thriller’s plot to the latter. Along with women and money, coffee was one of the few things Marlowe, a hardboiled dick, could ever get interested in.

In America the preparation and drinking of coffee has been important from the Boston Tea Party to the opening up of the frontier West. Today coffee is important in West Germany too: there, a giant chain of retailers named Tchibo dispenses beans, hot coffee and condensed milk at no fewer than 8500 outlets. But the news, released this week by Nestlé, that for every 200 million cups of tea a day Britons now swallow a million of coffee, shows that even a country as conservative in our drinking habits as ourselves has begun to move with the times at last.

Why have we taken so long? Even in the wake of Cliff Richard’s seminal coffee-bar movie Espresso Bongo (1960), Brits only used to down a single coffee for every six teas. Perhaps refusal to accept the merits of coffee has some national-gastronomic foundation; is built, one might say, into the very lining of the John Bull’s stomach. Mr Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror believes this to be the case. An editorial last week sermonised that Britain’s success in having the Industrial Revolution, building an Empire and winning two world wars was based on avoidance of coffee. ‘The shame of it!’, it lamented, ‘A nation made great by tea falling for filthy foreign habits’. For me, however, it is our tardiness in switching to coffee that is shameful.

I’ve nothing against tea. But only in Britain is it really difficult to get a good cup of coffee in a public place. You can be handed a passable mug of tea almost anywhere, but to find a decent draught of the more exotic alternative is a different matter. British Rail Maxpax coffees taste of plastic. After-curry coffees at otherwise excellent Indian restaurants are, in my experience, invariably a disappointment. A good coffee cannot be found in a good greasy spoon. As for office workers, they generally subsist on Cona. It is all a bit joyless.

To say this is not to be a snob, for the annoying thing about coffee is that it ought to be as available and as delicious in Solihull as it is in Soho. In Italy, after all, espressos and capuccinos refuse to discriminate between classes: their appeal is universal. In Italy coffee is dispensed with impassive finesse by tall, dark, handsome acrobats in nattily-cut and spotless white uniforms. The Italians specially invented the Gaggia pressure boiler to shorten cooking times. They wait for coffee standing up, in front of immaculately wiped bar-tops of gleaming rolled steel. In Italy coffee is a metaphor for a laudable national obsession – Speed: it is delivered in seconds from busy city cafés to autostrada service stations.

In Britain, by contrast, ignorance about coffee is so great that the word percolate is now nearly everywhere pronounced perculate – and in contexts unrelated to coffee too. Anyway, a percolator is an awful way of making coffee. Drawing liquor off the same grounds again and again, it stews them till all flavour escapes.

Brewed at home, it seems to me, nothing can compare with the fast and heady simplicity issuing from La Biglietta espresso pots (branded on their sides with a cartoon of a hatted Italian coffee freak), with the magisterial volumes available from La Cafétiere jug-and-plunger models, or with the purity of the flip-it-over Neapolitan machinetta. Each of these technologies, it can be argued, turns a hack’s addiction into a civilised and ritualistic pleasure.

According to Nestlé, 90 per cent of the coffee drunk in Britain is still of the instant variety. Seven per cent of us want our instant decaffeinated (whatever can be the point of that?), and a growing elite of Harrods shoppers are prepared to pay £3 a jar for instant nearly as palatable as fresh. But even those who do brew their own coffee tend to resort to instant in the morning. After dinner, they can be bothered; at breakfast, they can’t. They are not on the autostrada, they are on the A40.

What philistines. For me the story that Nescafe gained its name from the ironic Latin American comment no es café – it isn’t coffee – cannot be entirely apocryphal. Nor is it so unlikely that, as some accounts have it, the mass introduction of instant occurred when gum-chewing American GIs entered the gloomy trenches of the First World War. Nevertheless Britain still wallows in the bitterness of instant. We spend, in fact, more a year on instant coffee in the shops than the £500m we do on tea.

You could argue that we are only insensible to coffee because of the price of it. Certainly the countries that annually devour more than 10 kilos a head are those with a notoriously high standard of living: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway. But the striking thing about Britain’s craze for coffee is that it has emerged at a time of rising prices.

Last week the price paid for a tonne of beans on the London robusta futures market rose from £1800 to £2100. In January, prices hit an eight-year high, and coffee has proved the one agricultural commodity to become fundamentally more expensive in 1986. At the moment prices could stand poised for a run through to £4000 a tonne, a level not seen since the Brazilian frost of 1975. But though some experts feel that demand for coffee is ‘inelastic’ – that people will turn to other beverages as prices get too steep – all the signs are that the UK’s shift to coffee is irreversible.

No doubt late-night philosophical discussions over deep, earthy grey–green vases of hot Gold Blend have left a searing mark. For the first time since the coffeehouse era of Dryden, Pope and Swift, we have been re-infected by the drink of Voltaire, Marat, Robespierre, Danton and Napoleon; and, as ever, it is our universities and polytechnics that are to blame.

They say that, as trade in commodities goes, the $10 billion that changes hands each year for coffee is second only to oil. Like oil, coffee powers the world: at 71 million 60-kilo sacks, shipments in 1985 were an all-time record. But if the spread of coffee is reviving more Britons to do more work, our greater involvement in the international economics of coffee is not without portents. While City brokers grow ecstatic at each new hike in prices, our drinking habits are eagerly attended to by unstable states heavily reliant on coffee exports: by Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Uganda and Colombia.

Next month, the International Coffee Organisation convenes in London to decide much of the future of coffee. The ICO, a United Nations body comprised of 75 producing and consuming nations, is meant to set upper limits – quotas – on the amount of coffee producer nations export, so that they are not left entirely to the mercy of natural disasters and  the caprice of supply and demand. However the ICO’s meeting could prove stormy. Over the past year both of its two key members, America (a quarter of world imports) and Brazil (a third of world exports), have made noises about pulling out. More and more of the world’s coffee is traded outside the ICO’s jurisdiction, and a fearful drought on the Brazilian plantations of Minas Gerais, Parana and Sao Paõlo, plus a balance of stocks massively in favour of consumer nations, has put all cards in the hands of the North rather than the South.

Prices may rise. But as John Plender’s Channel 4 series Commodities recently concluded, it will not be the tropical peasant who benefits: he will just go on picking a back-breaking 90 kilos of ripe berries a day, gaining little for his labours.

So yes, let there be a cup of non-instant coffee on offer at every thoroughfare in Britain. But if, one day, roadside coffee does become popular, I will be asking how the stuff ever got here.