Tag Archives: drinks

We like coffee. Real coffee, that is; industrially processed instant concoctions don’t count. Instant brown beverages are banned, even in our caravan. How much more difficult is it to pour hot water onto real coffee grounds than onto powder or granules? Carol is particularly fond of cappuccino and I’ve got a soft spot for espresso. So, to feed this one of our addictions, we have a half-way reasonable Gaggia coffee machine taking up counter space in the kitchen together with a Dualit grinder to keep it supplied.

Supplied with what raw material, though? Clearly to make a decent concoction one needs some decent coffee beans. “Decent” is, of course, a matter of taste but, for espressos, I seem to favour something from the Java/Sumatra region. Originally I had settled upon one of the standard stock items from Whittard’s, their Santos and Java blend. However, with the relatively recent problems experienced by Whittard’s, supplies approached impossible and I found a very pleasant alternative called Blue Sumatra at our local coffee roaster in Leighton Buzzard.

This morning my stock of Blue Sumatra was running low and I didn’t think we had enough to last the weekend. If Carol doesn’t get her cappuccinos tomorrow morning, I’m dead, so I popped into town to buy another 500g. While the nice man was weighing out my purchase, I glanced over his shelves to see if anything else looked interesting. I was somewhat taken aback when the words “civet” and “cat” leapt out at me from a rather lengthy descriptive sentence on the label of one relatively small glass jar of coffee beans. Curious! I looked closer. The coffee beans were called Kopi Luwak. I can’t remember the exact words but the descriptive sentence read something like this:

Coffee beans from Sumatra that have been passed through the digestive system of the civet cat.

Now there’s something you don’t see every day, certainly not in Leighton Buzzard. Looking even more closely, I noticed that the price printed on this small jar, £11.25 or thereabouts, was for 125g. These golden nuggets of roasted civet excrement retail for £90 per kilo. Yikes! Little wonder that the glass jar was quite small. I hope the turnover is reasonable ‘cos I wouldn’t want to pay £90 a kilo for coffee beans that had lost their essential oils. Certainly not.

A swift dive into good ol’ Wikipedia tells the story of Kopi Luwak and reveals that it is supposedly the rarest, most expensive coffee in the world – and who could wonder at it? Judging by the Wikipedia article, our price in Leighton Buzzard is a steal. Stick that in your house-blend and watch the customers come flocking in. Maybe if Whittard’s had stocked civet shit coffee they would not have suffered financial problems?

Time for Java/Sumatra fans to start saving.

I would be the first to admit that, for some unfathomable reason, the Brits cannot make lager properly. I don’t understand why one the world’s finest brewing nations (the Belgians beat us into second place, I’m afraid) can turn out the world’s finest real ales whilst producing some of the most miserable lagers available, even when we are using someone else’s recipe. Having said that, since I rarely go to a pub, I settled upon good ol’ Stella Artois as my canned brew of choice for home consumption.  The stuff in the UK is brewed under license and is a pale shadow of the genuine Belgian article, since it has been brewed by the aforementioned lager-ruining country, but it was OK.

Recently, my erstwhile trusty Stellas didn’t seem so stallar; they just didn’t seem to be tasting as they should.  I blamed my taste-buds. Wrong! A swift glance at the information emblazoned upon the side of the can revealed the problem: the alcohol content has been cut from 5.2% to 5.0%. My taste-buds are vindicated. A swift trawl of the Internet found a claim that Morlands had reduced their formerly excellent Old Speckled Hen from 5.2% to 4.5%, though I haven’t yet managed to verify this myself as yet.

All the media hype about 4% so-called beers (Artois Petersen, Becks Vier) seems to be affecting the real thing. Despite our media banging on misguidedly about so-called cheap alcohol, the price is going up while the alcohol content seems to be dropping. I’m used to the thieving bankers slashing my savings interest rate but now the blasted brewers are cutting the alcohol rate as well. Is this interference by the nanny state?

I wish we could buy the genuine Belgian products without resorting to a “booze-cruise”.

After a final night at Looe disturbed by further generous helpings of wind and rain, we breathed a small sigh of relief when a respite in the weather arrived just after breakfast. We were moving on to one of our favourite fields just outside St. Minver Lowlands near Rock and packing and hitching up in inclement conditions is far from being an enjoyable experience. We almost made it. With pretty much everything and as it became time to hitch up, a vary large and very black cloud decided that our Looe total weather experience would be incomplete without the final thrill of a hearty hail storm. We waited it out sitting in the car, finally got the towing mirrors on and set off on yet another strenuous 40 miles or so.

We were looking forward to Rock. Not only would we have grass instead of a gravel hard-standing but, after our communication-free six days at Looe, we knew of a pub near Polzeath that had sold a fine pint of Cornish Rattler (cider) and provided free wifi – what a civilized combination. As a result of the severe weather suffered particularly by northern Cornwall last weekend, the grass in our longed-for field was decidedly squidgy underfoot but it was grass nonetheless and we soon had Billy Bailey installed without any traction problems.

Apart from the weather, all was well with the world. We arrived at Carters, the aforementioned pub, and found free wifi together with not one but two Cornish Rattlers; the original apple Rattler had been joined by pear Rattler. The nice barkeep provided me with their wifi key and a small sample of the pear cider which proved a bit sweet for my taste, though Carol liked it.

Subsequently, a jaunt around a local well-known supermarket revealed a few cider companies now producing pear cider. In my now distant youth I recall a drink that rejoiced under the name of Babycham, a so-called champagne perry, that was marketed at the ladies and was sold in very small bottles. (Well, we wouldn’t want to get the ladies tipsy now, would we?) I’m pretty sure that was a fizzy pear concoction. Maybe all this pear cider is a rebranded Babycham revival. A pint or two of pear Rattler should certainly get the ladies relaxed.