Coffee culture in Australia
Coffee culture in Australia is a big part of everyday life. Coffee seeds arrived with the British First Fleet in 1788, but Sydney’s climate made growing them difficult and tea stayed popular for a long time. Coffee began to take hold in Melbourne, where in 1845 Germain Nicholson sold coffee beans at his shop on Collins and Swanston Streets and people watched beans being roasted and ground by steam power.
After the gold rush, coffee grew in popularity as Parisian-style cafes appeared and the Temperance Movement promoted non-alcoholic options. Australia was still mainly a tea country, with very high tea consumption in the early 1880s, but coffee palaces opened in cities and towns across the country.
Australia developed a distinct coffee culture, built largely on independent cafes from the early 20th century. After World War II, Italian immigrants brought espresso machines, helping café culture flourish in places like Leichhardt, Sydney. In the 1950s Melbourne and Sydney saw many new Italian-style coffee houses. Vittoria, one of Australia’s best-known brands, started in the late 1950s and grew into a major coffee company.
The flat white, a small espresso drink with a larger amount of frothy milk, is often linked to Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s and became very popular in the 1990s. Greek cafés in Sydney and Melbourne also helped bring locally roasted coffee to the scene around 1910. Melbourne is often called the “coffee capital” because of its many cafés and roasteries. Australians generally prefer coffee with less sugar and a strong focus on quality and the coffee-making process.
Specialty coffee and boutique cafes are common, with many innovative roasting and brewing methods. About 95% of Australian cafés are independently owned, and international chains like Starbucks have only a small market presence. Domestic chains such as The Coffee Club, Michel’s Patisserie, Dôme in Western Australia, and Zarraffas in Queensland compete with independents because Australia developed a strong culture of small, independent cafes long before chains arrived.
Ristretto is a strong, smooth coffee with a high concentration. Australian iced coffee often uses cold brew rather than hot espresso and may include local flavors or ice cream. The Magic is a Melbourne specialty: a double ristretto with steamed milk served in a small tulip cup.
The Australian coffee industry today earns about US$5.8 billion a year. Australia grows only a small amount of its coffee, producing around 600 tonnes of green beans from about 850,000 trees annually, mainly in northern New South Wales and Queensland due to the subtropical climate. An experimental coffee plantation in Waggrakine, Western Australia in the 1870s failed because the climate wasn’t right.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 19:52 (CET).