(S)Cat. humor

I don’t know if you read the Sunday comics or not, but I do. It’s a bit old-fashioned, I know, to read an actual newspaper, but I enjoy the ritual. In fact, I prefer a newspaper to a computer most days. The news is a little older, but there is no screen to tire out your eyes and there aren’t any links to other pages that tempt you to waste time, both positive things.

Anyway, I was reading the comics on Sunday and came across a coffee reference in one of my favorite comics, Get Fuzzy. Darby Conley, the cartoonist who writes Get Fuzzy, has one of the oddest senses of humor of anyone I have ever read. Strangely enough, I appreciate it, and since the strip mentioned coffee, I thought I would pass it along to you.

To help you understand the comic a little better, ‘civet coffee’ is a type of coffee grown in Southeast Asia. Lots of coffees come from this region, but what makes this particular coffee unique is that it has passed through the digestive system of the civet cat (it’s often referred to as “cat poop” coffee). After the beans are collected, they wash them (hopefully, very thoroughly) before roasting them. The end product is supposed to be tasty and very mellow.

I have a hard time imagining how civet coffee is produced in quantities large enough to export. Do the farmers have a whole pack of caged civet cats that they feed coffee to in troughs (the industrial model), placing a bedpan below the cage to catch the waste? Or do they just send an army of collectors out to the coffee fields to collect as much cat dung as they can? (either one would be a sh***y job)

I have not seen civet coffee on any menu board around Portland, so I haven’t tried it yet. I'm not sure I'm ready to, either, but if I do try it, you will definitely hear about it.  

A sweet deal

I hope you were able to take advantage of Ben and Jerry’s Free Cone Day today, but if you weren’t, I have another deal to let you know about. It’s not an offer from me—I’m just passing along the information.

I have mentioned before that world coffee prices are going up—way up. As of today, green coffee prices are up over 100% from a year ago. In other words, prices have more than doubled in that time. The big coffee companies, like Starbucks and Folgers, have raised their prices several times in the last year. Many of the local roasters have raised their roasted bean prices too. Some have shifted from selling 16oz bags to selling 12oz bags for the same price, instantly raising the price per pound by 33% (some are even selling half-pound bags for nearly the same price!).

Therefore, I was surprised today when I stopped in at the Spunky Monkey café (that’s right, the super funky Spunky Monkey) and found that they were selling organic and fair trade coffees (which generally cost more to begin with) for $11 per pound. I haven’t seen full 1-lb bags of coffee in other local shops for a couple months, certainly not for $11.

There were three coffees available, all roasted yesterday: a fair trade/organic coffee from Peru, a fair trade/organic from Ethiopia (Sidama) and an organic coffee from Brazil. At this price, the coffees are as good a deal as you will find from a local roaster.

When I asked the owner how he could offer such a deal, he admitted he was probably going to have to raise prices soon. So if you are looking for a great deal on some local fresh-roasted coffee, you should stop in at the Spunky Monkey to get some before he does. 

Not sure how long this will last

Who says the sun doesn't shine in PDX?

You know it’s been a gray spring when the sun comes out one day and it makes the front page of the newspaper with the headline “Scary Yellow Globe in Sky Not Going to Stick Around” (as if we expected it to). Yes, it’s been a bit dreary around here. According to the National Weather Service, before last Friday (April 8^th), it had been 41 days since our last cloud-free day. The graph below, from The Oregonian, accompanied the story.

Looks like Portlanders are in serious need of some vitamin D

You can see that we haven’t seen the sun much since February 25^th, and that any sun we did have was only fleeting. Hopefully, Friday was a sign of good things to come and summer is just around the corner!

A good omen?

Espresso quality control

Here’s a demonstration of the variation in quality between cafés. Compare the two pictures below. In both cases, I ordered a double espresso.

Small and flavorful

Too big for an espresso

As you can see, there is a significant difference in the size of the drink (the quarter in the picture gives you a sense of the how big each one was). The difference in quality was even greater.

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Poetry, a picture and some links

It’s April 1st, but where’s the rain?

Does this mean spring has come again?

You see the sun, but dare not blink

It might be gone before you think

Today on this, the day of fools

Hopefully you broke some rules

Now set aside your long-week blues

Sit back and read some coffee news

The sun is fighting valiantly against the clouds

Good news for coffee drinkers in the Windy City! Stumptown is planning to open another roastery this year, in Chicago. It will be the company’s fourth city with a roastery, after Portland, Seattle and New York. Will Intelligentsia reciprocate in Portland? We'll see. link

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Book Review-A Sense of the World

It has been a while since I last wrote about traveling. That is mainly because I have not done any traveling lately, something that I hope to change soon. After all, traveling is one of the most valuable and invigorating experiences a person can have in life, in my opinion. If you don’t travel, you lose the opportunity to enjoy and appreciate the wider world.

In an effort to take to the road without actually taking to the road, I recently read A Sense of the World-How a Blind Man became History’s Greatest Traveler, written by Jason Roberts. The book is a biography of James Holman, a fearless traveling Englishman, who, in spite of his blindness, was able to travel all over the world. What makes the story even more compelling is that he did his traveling in the first half of the 19^th century.

Holman was not blind from birth. He was born in 1787, one of six brothers and the son of a pharmacist. In those days, class structures were very rigid in England, and Holman’s father had high ambitions for his son, whom he wanted to become a gentleman. One way for a commoner to do this was to reach officer status in the military, which is what James Holman did.

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Extracto Il Secondo

After spending time with the supermodel at Jim and Patty’s, I headed westward down Fremont Street, en route to the Albina branch of the Multnomah County Library. As I was walking, a  whiff of freshly-brewed coffee tickled my nose. It smelled wonderful, so I followed my nose toward the scent and stumbled upon another quality Portland café, Extracto 2*.

The sign is easy to find

[*Confession: That’s not exactly how things happened. What really happened was that I was kind of lost, so I checked my location on my phone, realizing that I was close to Prescott Street. Prescott Street stuck out in my mind as the location of the café (these days I tend to remember Portland streets by the cafés that are on them). I was only a few blocks away, so instead of going to the library, I headed for the café.]

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