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.