I’m here to tell you about one of those rare, lovely occasions in which two things you like collide into one another. It’s like the old Reese’s Cups commercials. (Kids, ask your parents.) One of the benefits of going to my grandmother’s house? She subscribed to tabloids. And sure, there was the National Enquirer. But why would you read about boring celebrities and gossip and such, when you could pick up the Weekly World News instead and read about Bigfoot, aliens, Elvis, and Elvis hanging out with Bigfoot and aliens? The writers there seemed to be playing the game of “Let’s see how wacky we can make this shit before nobody at all believes it” and it was brilliant. My favorite front page declared that twelve U.S. Senators were space aliens. (We should be so lucky.) I still a copy of the issue with my second favorite cover: the ghost of the Titanic finally arriving in New York.
A lot has changed since I was a kid reading WWN back in 1811. It’s online now. It has thrown off even the last shred of a tentative link to reality and is now just enjoying life and going hog wild. (But it’s still got the good stuff.) Also, back in my day, Bat Boy had just shown up. He’s since then become a franchise and even an off-Broadway musical (I still have a ball cap with the logo on it somewhere around here).
Now, this brings us to the second thing I like… the thing that came after my enjoyment of tabloids and something I’ve been abusing ever since: coffee. I saw a mention of Bat Boy Blend coffee on the Weekly World News Twitter account so I ordered it immediately. And here’s what I can report.
The merch page describes it with “flavor notes of brown sugar, dark chocolate, and orange.” I’m not getting any of that, although that could be because I have hammered my palate in the same way I have tortured my eardrums: mercilessly and with extreme malice. In my opinion it is, as Denis Leary once put it, coffee-flavored coffee. It hangs out in the cave with the Platonic Form of coffee. It is so very much “straight up, I got shit to do, I can’t even spell latte” coffee, that I have had every subsequent cup of it after tasting it…in a diner mug. Because coffee like this tastes best in a diner mug.
Now, don’t misconstrue: none of this is a knock against the coffee. I’m just saying: sometimes you just want Coffee Dammit, and in my opinion this is that coffee. Dammit. And I always save a place in my heart for coffee that’s no frills and just wants to keep your ass awake while at the same time avoids being (in the immortal words of an IHOP waitress) “black water.” It’s roasted by Black Forge Coffee out of Pittsburgh (they are apparently dedicated to coffee, tea, and metal—go to their website and enjoy).
P.S. Personally, I hope if they ever come out with a different roast, they say it’s the Bat Boy version of Kopi luwak.
