Director's Notes – Episode 118

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

New Zealand cares deeply about good coffee. Not iced coffee. They give no shits about iced coffee, which I learned when my friends ordered iced coffees and they brought them milk shakes. 

I'm fine with this. I don't like iced coffee. I respect NZ's ridiculous parody of Americans' need to put ice cubes in everything (coffee, tea, chocolate milk, wine, urinals, safe deposit boxes, tube socks, etc.). 

NZ also has the flat white. Given that they refer to an espresso as a short black and an americano as a tall black, I initially assumed that a flat white was a latte, but I was corrected quickly on this. 

"No," said the Auckland barista, "a latte is just hot milk, whereas a flat white ('flet woyt') is a double ristretto shot with a thin layer of semi-foamed milk." 

"Hey," I said to the barista, "this tastes like coffee soaked in silk and then adorned with opals and placed on my lips with a gentle kiss, and it's delicious." 

And I wanted to high-five the man or at least shoot a finger gun his way, but he had already moved on to the next order. He was all business, and I respected that. I simply gave the "OK" hand sign and then winked at no one while muttering "he's a true hero, that kiwi barista man." 

Somewhere in the world, a good dog was watching a setting sun.

Later I returned home and started seeing flat whites ("flit weets") on several coffee shop menus, and learned that in America, a flat white just means "a 20 oz cup of hot milk." As the great Joni Mitchell once sang "Don't it always seem to go/that you don't know what you got till it's gone./A flat white is a artisanally-crafted hot coffee beverage served in an 8oz or smaller cup."

I love the Night Vale baristas because they're a kingdom - a secret hive of steampunk mustaches, leather aprons, and spiked coffee hammers (manual grinding enhances the roast, unlike a burr grinder, which bruises the true flavor). It's comforting to create a world of artists who care deeply enough about their craft that they must retreat to a covert society below a hardware store to protect sacred knowledge. 

In New Zealand, baristas are gentle people safely nestled far into our world's most vast ocean, but in America baristas don't have this haven. They are beholden to demands for large tankers of hot milk and syrup. And ice cubes. Ice cubes in damned everything.

- Jeffrey Cranor
November 15, 2017