Beans come in, beans go out
These are real drinks, I would not flannel you. Well, I would flannel you, but I am not flanneling you on this occasion. I haven’t drunk cheese coffees but given the proliferation of cafe culture, surely it won’t be long before someone offers me these beverages at a reasonable (unreasonable) price. I could make them for myself at short notice, but where’s the fun in that?
oh no I am being specifically targeted by bicycle tattoo lady
I love how the two anthropomorphized coffee cheeses appear to have dramatically different personalities.
Now I’m imagining a wacky 1960’s TV sitcom where the two of them share an apartment.
Not to be too pedantic, but in the Puerto Rican one, the cheese looks kind of despairing. It’s the bread which is relaxing in that one.
Yep, I think you are right. I had assumed that was a huge chunk of smoked Edam, but now I see the actual cheese. Still, I think the Leipäjuusto and the bread would work well as roommates in an old sitcom.
CHEESE and CHEESE: Dairy Products Gone BAD!
Not sure whether to ‘eeeagh plbt’ or ‘hm I’d try that’ for the cheoffees.
I have always been of the opinion that cream cheese makes everything better.
I have also always been of the opinion that you can’t make coffee worse.
I have learned that there is nothing so awful that someone, somewhere will not be able to think of a way to make it worse. And it’s when you think that, surely, it’s now reached peak terribleness that they usually choose to show off their makening it worser-skills.
This just made me think of Casu Martzu (aka “maggot cheese”). Surely a cheese that is actually supposed to rotten-smelling and full of maggots is the pinnacle of awfulness.
If you put some of that in coffee, at least the hot coffee will kill the maggots.
You hope…
“9-1-1, what is your emergency? …Sir, you’ll have to speak up. Sir?” (puts hand over microphone, whispers to colleague) “Get this — he thinks his apartment is full of worms hopped up on caffeine.”
“Now he says the bread is smiling at him!”
Coffeese surely 😅
I am lactose intolerant and would drink the fuck out of that. I also can’t have coffee. HERE FOR A GOOD TIME, NOT FOR A…
So you either get bready cheese, or bread and cheese. Seems like cheese isn’t the only thing with which they’re experimenting.
Also: made o’ edam
Nice to see that when she’s confused Lottie call Little Claire asking her for life advices. They truly are great friends ♡. About the cheese in coffee… why, oh, why ruin coffee like that!?
I was thinking more along the lines of why, oh, why ruin cheese like that?
It is not actually chemically possible to ruin Edam. it is composed of pure elemental sadness.
I misread that as “pure emmenthal sadness”
I’ll raclette you off.
Bear in mind this is the kind of innovative thinking that got us peanut butter cups.
I thought that happened because 2 people crashed into each other… one of them eating an open jar of peanut butter while walking… as one does…
That was the “I did not inhale” explanation.
“I did not have chocolate relations with that peanut butter.”
If your normal mode of snacking is to walk around eating peanut butter directly from the jar, some sort of epiphany is all-but-inevitable. If you start at the lowest point on the landscape, any movement will take you upwards.
It is not possible to ruin coffee, it comes pre-ruined. Hence all the desperate attempts to fix it with additives, different ways of preparing it, and even feeding the beans to a cat to see if they are improved by pooping them out (apparently they are, but it’s a low bar).
Just have a nice cup of tea.
Now I like tea, but this heretical comment is a borderline moderation issue.
If pointing out the essentially tantalizing and disappointing nature of coffee is heretical, then I don’t want to be orthodox. Anyhow, we drink it despite, so all is good, hm?
Coffee is a beverage that smells awesome and tastes awful.
More for the rest of us. 😀
Finally, someone who understands the true nature of coffee.
I learn more about pop culture from this comic, I swear.
I didn’t know this! I heard Jimmy Buffett say it on stage.
The videogame Hearthstone also paid homage to the line recently.
I can see why, the song’s catchy!
Lottie’s hot on the trail of A MYSTERY!!
…Namely, why a person would drink something so hideous…
The Case Of The Extremely Confused Digestive System
So, I’m reminded of way back in the beginning of “The Case of the Lonely One”, when Lottie was dreading six years of Little Claire.
I note also that that strip contains the words “MORE BEANS MAN”, scribed by Lottie’s hand. Fate? Foreshadowing? Synchronicity? Who knows?
I, too, remember this strip. But I was always under the impression that Fartzilla had an appetite for a different kind of beans.
Beans come in, beans go out.
I’m both mildly disgusted at the idea of cheese in coffee, yet mildly intrigued as well.
“Beans come in, beans go out” is pretty much the customer’s relationship with coffee, too.
See also Kopi luwak
Oh, God.
I have heard of the Swedish cheese in coffee from Atlas Obscura but not the Puerto Rican.
Gromit, the Edam is stranded!
I like coffee and I like cheese, but this concept I need to consider very carefully. I am not initially inclined in it’s favour
Leipäjuusto is a ‘bready cheese’ in name only. If anything it is a squeaky cheese. I would have it with cloudberry jam on top, I would have it as a paneer stand-in in palak paneer, but in coffee… Um, no.
And taking a better look at the panel now, I think the cheese agrees.
You are clearly the expert here so can you tell me why it isn’t Finlandic, with that name?
Because the Swedes made it with a Finnish cheese. If I dropped a whole Camembert in a cup of Nescafé I do not think the nation of France could or would take credit for my innovation!
Yes. The cheese is Finnish indeed, but this is the first I hear about Swedes putting it in coffee! Next thing they will be making coffee with mämmi, I suppose. 😐
Coffee with mämmi actually sounds delicious.
I’m not sure the British sensibilities can handle the concept of mämmi right after being told about kahvijuusto.
Well, now that I’ve googled a bit, I discover that it is indeed a tradition in some parts of Finland as well, especially in the north and also along the Swedish border. Some people in online discussions say that it is mainly older people who do this, though. The reason is that the cheese is tastier when warmed up, and I certainly can’t argue with that.
According to the first article that DuckDuckGo found me, kaffeost is a Sami creation. This would explain its transcendence of borders (Arctic nomads don’t always pay a lot of attention to such things) and a lot else (the Sami are a likable and interesting people, but their living conditions drive them to extremes, and one gets the feeling that if it doesn’t involve some kind of reindeer product, they don’t consider it food or drink).
Café con queso apparently features chocolate, cinnamon, and just a sliver of hard cheese to give it a nutty, creamy quality. Which sounds dangerously close to being worth trying.
It is only a tradition in the far north of Sweden too.
The custom is from Tornedalen, an area which straddles the current Sweden Finnish border. People not from Tornedalen decided it should have a national border down the middle after Sweden and Russia had an tiff in the early 19th century. Isn’t imperialism great?!
Very strong content, Bengt, welcome to the Scary Go Round platinum club
The Mikael Niemi novel Popular Music from Vittula is set in Tornedalen. It’s a work that I think the Bad Machinery crowd would enjoy.
Just today I was scrolling the twitters and was, in a thread about odd 17th century beverages, accosted by the notion of cheese coffees for the first time. And now I see this.
Coincidence? I think so.
What’s the etiquette for eating/drinking cheese coffee? Do you eat the cheese first or do you take it together like when you drink an overchunky soup from a cup and the chunks get in the way and make you dribble?
I look forward to finding this out too.
The Sami coffee-cheese is eaten in small bits, together with the coffee just as you would a biscuit. You can dunk it if you want or just chew it between sips. It makes a very satisfying squeaky sound when chewed, the taste is very neutral perhaps a wee bit nutty, the cheese definitely doesn’t melt.
Yes and a stringy cheese is going to make some awful messy drinking.
When it comes to unpleasant messes, ingesting this concoction would be the digestive phase I’d be *least* concerned about.
Flannelmouth
I’d like to see some Surströmning coffee. Or better yet, see someone drinking Surströmning coffee.
You might very well think so, but I couldn’t possibly agree.
Actually I believe surströmming will be Sweden’s single most powerful contribution to the common defence when they join NATO.
There are rules of war we should not break. That would be one step too far.
“Fermentation continues in the can, causing it to bulge noticeably, which would usually be a sign of botulism or other food poisoning concern in non-fermented canned foods. Species of Halanaerobium bacteria are responsible for the in-can ripening. These bacteria produce carbon dioxide and a number of compounds that account for the unique odour: pungent (propionic acid), rotten-egg (hydrogen sulfide), rancid-butter (butyric acid), and vinegary (acetic acid). Due to these gases, a thousand cans of surströmming exploded over a period of six hours during a fire at a Swedish warehouse in 2014.”
I couldn’t possibly order that coffee on account of not being able to pronounce it.
This has reminded me that I forgot to buy cheese when I was in the Co-op earlier. Think we’re alright for coffee though.
I’m reading along with the GoComics version of Bad Machinery because of the comments aspect, and I’m assuming that somehow in later years Lottie and Little Claire somehow become good friends, something I would not have expected.
Not only that, Claire appears to be the closest friend Lottie has left.
It seems she hasn’t seen much of Mildew since the fallout of the terrible chain of events Mildred set in motion in “The Great Unboxing” sent the kids their separate ways, and her alliance with Shauna remains severed, with Lottie having to get her news of Shauna indirectly through Mildred. And the boys might as well have fallen off the face of the planet after Bad Machinery ended.
At least she’s still got Shelley, and now Billie in Tredregyn.
But Circus Windows was all about Mildred getting Lottie back into action, no? (And I seem to have missed “The Great Unboxing”, which is a terrible thought.)
Yeah, but also about mending their friendship, broken when Mildred went off to college and Lottie stayed in Tackleford. While they put the pieces back together, I think there’s still that distance between them. While as we see here, and at the end of “Circus Windows”, Claire is the one Lottie is sharing her life events with.
“The Great Unboxing” kind of got unpersoned, which is sad. It’s got its flaws — mainly the way it doesn’t really have a climax, just kind of stutters to a stop — but like everything John A writes, there’s a lot of gold in there. I really liked seeing the mystery kids who we’d watched growing up all through Bad Machinery take their turn to be mentors to the next generation.
John linked a PDF of it in the comments of “Circus Windows”. I don’t think it’s available anywhere else at this point.
Ooh, thank you for the link!!
Wen-Tack is made out of a few different- unfinished things that I didn’t have the energy left to tie together properly (after writing By Night and Giant Days every month). I should have taken a break and made them properly, but I’d been doing daily webcomics for nearly 20 years at that point and didn’t think I could stop… ever.
I loved your take on Grendel and Grendel’s mom, FWIW. (I always loved the original Beowulf story too – what is the one thing worse than a monster? The monster’s mom!)
Wow, I’d never thought to link Fit Mum to Grendel’s mum from “Beowulf”.
I wonder if Mildred saved Grendel from getting his arm torn off in his first appearance…
Cafe con qu… que… queas o o o o o o sweet baby cheeses nooooooo! I can’t force the blasphemous words out of my mouth!
Those two lines could be the start of a classic motown tune – I’ve got the melody in my head now, but can’t figure out if it’s Otis Redding or Etta James
I mean….butter in coffee is a thing? So cheese…not too much more of a stretch?? I don’t think my stomach could handle it.
I’m seeing a turf war with the local Happy Lemon in the near future.
Nothing new about that. I used to dunk lumps of orange cheddar in my instant black coffee back in the ’80s. I loved the blobs of melted cheese that used to float on top. And then, I went to Italy and discovered espresso, and my life changed forever.
I can only guess that at the time, you were desperate and out of cream?
Bullet coffee, meet artillery shell coffee.
the charlotte and giant mug aesthetic is on point 5/5 star-shaped bries
Culinary cowards will never know magic.