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For the many New Zealanders and Australians living in London, finding a decent brew in the Mother Country has long been considered an outright impossibility.
Mercifully, however, a relatively recent injection of Antipodean-influenced cafes and coffee expertise has delivered a long-overdue shot of quality into the city's coffee cups.
In this year's inaugural Cafe of the Year awards, judged by London's cultural bible, Time Out magazine, three of the top five - Flat White, Sacred and Bullet - happen to be owned, operated and staffed almost exclusively by New Zealanders and Australians.
Added to that, Fernando & Wells, the English/Spanish cafe that was awarded the top prize, relies heavily on Antipodean baristas.
There's a good reason New Zealand's much-lauded coffee culture has started to thrive in London. The British have been raised on a diet of oversized, overpriced and average coffee provided by cafe chains such as Starbucks, Caffe Nero and Costa.
"[The English] just don't know any better. It's an education thing," says Liv Bjorklund, co-manager of Flat White in Soho.
"A lot of our customers in the first year, they said they had never tasted anything like it before. We were blowing their minds and they were saying, 'Wow, that tastes incredible. I never knew coffee could taste like that'."
Tubbs Wanigasekera and Matthew Clark, the Kiwi owners of Sacred Cafe in the bustling shopping enclave of Carnaby St, agree that five years ago few, if any, Brits would ever meet in a cafe. And while they believe the English are slowly starting to catch on, they feel New Zealand is still seven to 10 years ahead when it comes to overall coffee nous.
As well as their cafe in Carnaby St, the pair have opened a successful coffee kiosk on one of the busiest streets in London and are looking to open another cafe in Covent Garden or Islington. Phil Ross, who co-owns Bullet cafe and roastery with his sister Vicki, says he looked for a good cafe "everywhere I went" before setting up their business.
"All of the coffee was terrible," he says.
Ross says his friends told him that "coffee is just something you have to give up when you come to London".
"So I figured that if I was going to find a good cafe, I'd have to do it myself."
While Bullet is still a relatively small operation, the Rosses also supply their unique blend of coffee to a few cafes and restaurants, including Providores, the restaurant of celebrity chef Peter Gordon.
Bjorklund says that because beverage preference is a rather subjective field, there are obviously a number of other countries gunning for the title of "world's best coffee".
Italy will always be considered the home of the espresso, for example, despite the fact the coffee bean originated in Ethiopia and espresso, which means fast, is actually an American bastardisation of the Italian word spresso, which means pressed. But she thinks New Zealand could stake a claim to being home to the world's best coffee and milk.
Ross, who has spent a lot of time in Italy, agrees with the "coffee and milk" hypothesis. He says Italians "roast their beans really dark, they use poor quality robusta, and they're not in it for the taste, they're in it for the hit".
New Zealand coffee, on the other hand, offers the best of both worlds: a strong dose of caffeine as well as taste and smoothness.
But how, in deepest, darkest Aotearoa, did such a vibrant coffee culture develop? Bjorklund puts it down to combination of quality dairy products and our refined palates.
Wanigasekera pins New Zealand's recent, rapid and somewhat perplexing coffee diaspora on the quirky, passionate entrepreneurs of the 1980s, who started out small and began opening cafes before making the transition to coffee importation, blending and roasting.
So do those of foreign extraction agree that New Zealand is home to some of the world's best coffee? Could the flat white be the new sauvignon blanc?
While Bjorklund says Flat White is informally known as the "Antipodean embassy" by some, she estimates that around half of its customers are British locals, many of whom work in film and post-production around Soho.
In fact, so good has the cafe's reputation become that in some cases, she says, older English customers from the country have heard about the New Zealand-run cafe and made a trip to the city to see what all the fuss is about.
Even the owner of the huge British coffee chain Costa paid Flat White a visit one night and, not surprisingly, was suitably impressed. He also offered to supply the cafe with coffee beans. The management politely declined.
Bjorklund says the owners are considering expanding their cafe empire to explore the niche that seems to be developing in London for quality coffee - "give it five years," she says. "We have a lot of people come in saying, 'This is my first flat white in two years'," she says. "But I do wonder, does it really need to be such a luxury in London?"
