What is a Long Black?
Everything you need to know about the coffee lover’s drink of choice
TL;DR The Long Black is a short coffee, typically served in a smaller cup, similar in size to a flat white. It’s effectively a double shot of espresso, poured directly onto around 100 ml of hot water, creating a strong black coffee. This allows it to retain a lot of the taste characteristics of the espresso with the crema on top without being too intense and giving you a longer-lasting drink to boot.
What is it?
Ahhh, the Long Black. This favorite drink of ours is an incredibly uncommon order in the Forest of Dean (where we're based), but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying to drink. It’s a coffee lover's beverage. A perfectly balanced drink combining a short cup of hot water with the brilliance of a double espresso on top.
In a lot of ways, the Long Black is incredibly similar to the Americano. Both in how it tastes and how the barista on shift will make the fabled drink. When it comes to the Long Black at Hips, a barista will typically take one of our smaller yellow 8-ounce cups and fill it with around 100 ml of hot, boiling water directly from the espresso bar’s dedicated water boiler. Then, they will carefully pull a double shot of espresso straight into that water directly.
As before with the Americano, this ensures the two ingredients mix perfectly while allowing the crema to remain unbroken due to the amount of water in the Long Black. It’s quite an intense cup of coffee in comparison to something like an Americano or even a Flat White.
Unlike the Americano that’s often offered as white or black, depending on your milk preference, the Long Black is typically served without milk. You can of course request some on the side; however, it’s not entirely common.
The Coffee
As with all of our drinks at Hips, the perfect coffee starts with the perfect beans. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mocha with an extra shot, oat milk, and caramel syrup, or a Long Black itself; each and every caffeinated drink gets the same time and care taken on that key ingredient, the espresso. As a team, we take a huge amount of pride in our espresso and how we prepare it.
For our house blend, our coffee shops in the Forest of Dean use a special mix of both Ethiopian and Brazilian coffee beans, roasted to perfection by our friends over at Studio Coffee Roasters in Hereford. This exceptional blend of African and South American coffee provides a mesmerizing mix of flavors and character, perfectly balanced and ideal for any and all coffee drinks. Our House blend is roasted to a medium profile, ensuring we retain those unique characteristics without sacrificing that bitterness that a good coffee is known for.
Good coffee forms the basis of a good drink, so don't neglect it (Image Credit: Hips Social)
That said, the Long Black is a coffee lover’s drink, and at Hips, like our Americanos, we typically make them using our Guest espresso. This changes regularly, often from month to month, providing our regulars with an exciting new coffee to try each and every time we refresh our Guest grinder. With coffees from all different regions in the world, it's a real dynamic treat. However, you can, of course, ask for our House espresso if you’d prefer that characteristic flavor or just don't fancy something quite as exotic.
Regardless of whether it’s House or Guest, our espresso preparation remains the same throughout, and usually we keep our recipes very consistent (although some coffees do demand slight tweaks, dependent on the bean, roast, and process it goes through). Each shot pulled requires 18 g of freshly ground coffee, distributed into one of the handles of our coffee machine, carefully tamped, and pulled through the machine. Our espresso bars, Faema E71s, then use 9 bars of pressure to force 92°C water through the coffee puck, eventually leaving us with around 36g of beautiful espresso on the other end.
For the best-tasting espresso, we aim for each shot to run for around 27-33 seconds, with three seconds of pre-infusion included (wetting the coffee puck to get the flavors out a bit smoother). This gives us a perfectly balanced shot.
If caffeine isn’t your jam, we also have a decaf solution in the form of a Colombian coffee, once again roasted by the experts at Studio Coffee Roasters.
Custom Long Blacks
Although milk usually isn’t common with a Long Black, you can of course request a touch of it on the side to take away some of that bitterness. Alternatively, an iced Long Black is an incredible drink to enjoy in the summer months, and espresso over ice typically changes the taste characteristics entirely in comparison to its heated alternative.
Takeaway vs. In House
When it comes to our takeaway Long Blacks, we typically make these with slightly more water inside a flat white cup. Ensuring you can enjoy the taste of that brilliant espresso for a little while longer without overly compromising on the strength or altering the taste in any major way.
The Origins of the Long Black
So where did the Long Black come from? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it initially originated in Italy. It often gets confused with the origins of the Americano. Two very similar beverages, the Long Black first arrived as a single shot of espresso pulled over hot water poured inside of a cappuccino cup. This was a reaction to American tourists requesting a simple black coffee, whereas Italian baristas typically only worked with espressos, macchiatos, and cappuccinos in the early years.
The variant we have today with far less water was predominantly popularized in the New Zealand and Australian coffee scenes before spreading globally and is now a thoroughly enjoyed drink around the world.
Like most things in the coffee industry, there's very little consensus on the recipe for the Long Black (Image Credit: Hips Social)
Because of this, there's no one "standardized" recipe for the Long Black either. Depending on which cafe you go to and which barista you ask, you'll find the size covers everything from a (more modern-styled) Flat White all the way to a slightly smaller (traditional) Americano.
Even its name lacks consistency, with some shops referring to it as a Short Black instead, reserving the Long Black for that again traditional single-shot small Americano.