Haggis is a traditional Scottish dish, made of a sheep’s heart, liver, and lungs, mixed with oats and spices. It’s known for being simmered in a sheep’s stomach, but I didn’t have one handy, so I had to settle for tupperware and a microwave.

You can read about my experience with the haggis itself over on my other blog: Food Review: Haggis in a Can. But this is a coffee blog, so you can probably see where this is going.

I put the microwaved haggis into a cup, then added coffee and sealed it. I let it soak for over 48 hours, to make sure the spicy meaty taste had time to infuse into the coffee.

When I took it out of the fridge and opened it, the smell was not entirely pleasant. I still had to give it a chance, though. I set up an apparatus to filter out the chunks, leaving only pure black haggis-flavoured coffee. Or at least that was the plan.

I ran into a problem. The meat had made the coffee oily and thick; so much so that it refused to drip through my coffee filter. I had to carefully squeeze the filter, coaxing it out the bottom a squirt at a time, not unlike milking a cow. I did this twice, to make sure no chunks remained. It was a slow process, and yielded only a tiny amount of thickened coffee.

Ah well, it’s enough to get a sense of the taste. Bottoms up.

Oh, no. This is not good. Salt is the first taste that hits my mouth, but then the unmistakable taste of mashed up sheep heart, liver, and lungs hits me. It’s a dark, bitter, lingering taste, made even more unpalatable by the coffee.

Oh Christ. This is like drinking the vomit of someone who just won a gravy-chugging contest.

I got some on my fingers and the smell won’t go away. Oh God. I keep washing them. I keep washing my mouth out. It’s still there. Will this be with me forever?

Oh Jesus.

Do not want.

At least I also got this in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

It’s much better. All the taste of Scotland, without feeling like you need to induce vomiting just so there is a more pleasant taste in your mouth.

Oh yeah, obligatory sink shot:

Sorry.

But first let’s look back to the Coffee Hack we hosted in February. It was a resounding success, with all sorts of adventurous people showing up, many with their own ingredients to try in combination with coffee.

We had all the coffee hardware you could dream of.

Including a beer infuser, which sorta maybe almost worked. It’s at least good in theory; Mill Street’s Coffee Porter is one of my favourite beers.

Labels were important. Participants created coffees that were everything from sweet to spicy to savoury.

Unusual brewing methods were as abundant as unusual ingredients. Co-organizer Laura tried out some delicious flavoured cold brew coffee. Other co-organizer Andrew “Twitch” Berdan handled the Turkish coffee. He also brought some home-made ingredients, like this from-scratch cottage cheese:

It didn’t look appetizing, but the cheese didn’t affect the taste of the coffee much, so I’d say it’s neither recommended nor a disgusting failure.

My main contribution stemmed from the idea that traditional Thanksgiving foods—turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pie—all go well together, and leave you feeling warm and satisfied, but also sleepy. How can we possibly have all the goodness of Thanksgiving without the sleepiness?

Coffee. The answer is coffee.

(The following pictures are courtesy of Jody “3oh6″ Bailey; more pics here)

Step 1: Brew coffee with low salt chicken broth in the water.

Step 2: Add gravy powder and instant mashed potato mix.

Step 3: Add cream and sugar. Top with whipped cream. Garnish with more gravy powder.

Step 4: Top with cranberry stuffing biscotti. This was another of Twitch’s creations, and was delicious on its own and dipped in coffee.

The Thanksgiving coffee itself, oh man, I was not expecting it to actually taste good, but it was like a family holiday in my mouth. Just a bit of each ingredient made sure nothing was overpowering (like the downfall of many of my creations, saltiness). I quickly gave thanks to every known deity for leading this liquid comfort into my belly. Thanksgiving coffee is worth trying.

Bottoms up to a successful Coffee Hack. Let’s do this again sometime.

She could not risk her life by telling me which underground market in which Asian country she had smuggled the rare florets from. However, she did let me take some, in order to distill it into my own elixir.

I cannot read the codified script on the jar, but I am told these are dried flowers of some sort. They also appear to be shrunken. Although originally created to add zest and vitality to tea, my specialty is in the transmutation of coffee.

I used black coffee with a small dipper full of sugar.

I had trouble getting over the dead-June-bugs-in-a-puddle look, but once I did, the taste was not the least bit unpleasant. It was quite like sipping coffee among the flowers of a botanical garden. Or like putting a dab of perfume in your morning brew. Except less poisonous. I could feel my spirits lifting and my humours balancing almost immediately.

Perhaps for Valentine’s Day I will sprinkle my true love’s coffee with ground up rose petals. Wouldn’t that be romantic?

WOULDN’T IT?

P.S. I cannot explain the style this post is written in. Thanks to Vivian for the flower things. You can probably find dried rose buds(I think that’s what these are) wherever unusual foods are sold.

Bacon was first placed into coffee.

Researcher proceeded to hold bacon up to light while laughing maniacally.

Bacon and coffee were then placed into Magic Bullet apparatus and blended for 10 seconds (or less). No cream was added. The mixture took on a creamy colour and texture. Repeat: no cream was added.

Researcher became nervous; began to exhibit signs of distress such as sweating and trembling hands.

Despite further blending, chunkage was apparent. Given previous encounters with chunks, researcher became visibly agitated. After several minutes of contemplation and pacing, he exclaimed “[expletive deleted], I’ve got it,” produced a coffee filter, and set up another apparatus.

Coffee was poured through (another) filter in order to remove chunks. Coffee had taken on thick texture and required manual squeezing in order to drain into mug. Researcher became covered in oily coffee.

Yield was small, but enough to gauge properties of coffee. Filtering was successful; no chunks were detected. The texture was, however, slimey. Taste was not terrible. Smokiness of bacon came through, as did saltiness. However, the researcher was left unsatisfied, expressing a desire for an idealized bacon coffee that he claimed to “have dreamed about nightly,” yet also added, “I will not rest until I find it.”

Further research is needed.

Footnote: The unfiltered, chunk-laden coffee was also attempted. Not recommended. Taste was similar to Cafe Benedict, except chewier.

Readers with strong stomachs may wish to observe the residue.

This research was funded by two generous organizations: Klix offers spiffy coffee vending kiosks, while Flavia offers smaller bean to cup coffee machines. Those certainly look better than vending machines where I’ve worked. The sludge that came out of those didn’t need weird things to taste weird.

Two follow-up experiments in combining bacon with coffee were conducted under careful laboratory conditions. Test #2 is presented below. Test #3 will follow in next week’s volume.

Bacon Coffee, Test #2:

No-Name brand SIMULATED BACON BITS CONTAINS NO MEAT were distributed over the coffee grounds. Coffee was then brewed as normal.

A surprising finding: after being soaked with water, the bacon bits resemble bacon more than they did before:

The primary finding was that SIMULATED BACON BITS CONTAINS NO MEAT did not contribute the desired amount of flavour. Even after sweetening with cream and honey, the coffee remained nearly unaffected, save for an unpleasant increase in saltiness. Researcher concluded that bacon bits in coffee were not even repugnant enough to be of significant interest.

Further tests are needed.

Apparently cassava looks like this:

Hmm. Not something I’d want to put near my tongue, but luckily it came all peeled and chopped up. Some Googling revealed that it’s a potato-like vegetable. Tapioca is made from processing it into flour. I also came across this tidbit:

Konzo is an epidemic paralytic disease. The outbreaks are associated with several weeks of almost exclusive consumption of insufficiently processed bitter cassava.

How can you resist a vegetable with its own paralytic disease?

As for how to prepare it, a friend on Twitter suggested this recipe for Vietnamese cassava cake. Hopefully making it into a cake would be “sufficient processing” to stave off the konzo.

The cake was … different. The cassava has a unique taste; kind of like potato, but with a bitter aftertaste that I attribute to the konzo-causing cyanide.

I couldn’t eat the whole thing though, so it was time to throw some in coffee.

I can definitely taste the cassava. That bitterness I mentioned seems to be accentuated by the coffee. However, this isn’t terrible. To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of the cake, so this was a good excuse to plop some in coffee, take two sips, then toss it down the drain. Yet here I am, halfway through the mug, still drinking.

The caramel taste of the condensed milk is nice here (and would probably be great in coffee on its own). The texture is thicker than coffee, kinda powdery.

It’s getting even thicker as I get to the bottom. I can taste the poison bitterness more and more with each sip.

There’s a slight sludge at the bottom, but not enough to worry about. Bottoms up!

Oh god. Is that a tingling in my extremities?

Apparently Chia seeds are not only edible, but nutritious too.

The seeds come out as tiny dry pellets. Following the instructions for growing a Chia pet, I soaked them in water for about half an hour, after which they became a jelly-like mass.

Honestly, looking at it, this grossed me out more than a lot of other things I’ve tried here. Especially since the Chia pet they came with still haunts my nightmares.

But I had to try the stuff on its own before putting it in coffee (to make sure it follows the one rule). The gooey texture was a bit weird, and was followed by some crunchiness that reminded me of poppy seeds. The taste was slightly nutty with a hint of a fresh, citrusy flavour.

Definitely edible, so time to add it to coffee.

“Luckily,” the stuff floated instead of sinking to the bottom. It stayed as a solid mass at first, but with a little encouragement the seeds broke up and whatever chemical sludge holds them together dissolved into the coffee. Bottoms up.

You know, this is not as bad as I was fearing. Remember the drink Orbitz?

I’m reminded of that, or bubble tea. The solid bits add an odd sensation to each sip as they slip and slide down my throat, but don’t really affect the taste of the coffee. I feel some of them clinging onto and between my teeth, but hey, I was planning on flossing anyway.

All in all, I wouldn’t ch-ch-chow down on this every day, but it was a surprisingly enjoyable experiment.