Coffee Comrades

These days the biggest challenge facing any aspiring left wing revolutionary must surely be coming up with an iconic image. All the best ones have been taken: Lenin's goatee, Stalin's 'Uncle Joe', Mao's sociopathic stare, Fidel's Freudian cigars and Che's berets. So balaclavas off to Subcomandante Marcos, public face, or rather not, of the Mexican Zapatistas.

Of course, any well schooled revolutionary will be only too aware that if their predecessors hadn't been quite so, err, revolutionary, they'd have ensured a copyright legacy the Hendrix family would envy. No doubt with such thoughts in mind and to turn a buck for the Chiapas cause, they've come up with this rather splendid idea. I spotted it in 'Roots and Fruits Organic' store on Great Western Road.

Stick that in your Fair Trade pipe and smoke it!

Still, as anyone who ever tried drinking Nicaraguan coffee to support the Sandinistas will tell you, fighting for them would have been a hell of a lot easier. Their coffee was shit.

Well, hurrah, because Cafe Rebelde Zapatista is anything but butt. It's really good. Clean, fruity, acidic and even verges on refreshing. It's not as complex as some coffees but neither is it as heavy. It also has a really nice caffeine hit. Lifting without gibbering. Mind, after finishing the jug I was pretty lifted.

By a remarkable coincidence a few days later in work, Julie turned up with a present from her holidays... and, no escaping it, this really was shit coffee.

Civet shit to be precise.

And they say it was a brave man who first ate an oyster.....

A great cup of coffee. Complex, chocolaty mouthful with an earthy finish.

Roots and Fruits Organic

455 Great Western Road, (just past Kelvinbridge)

Glasgow

G12 8HH

0141 339 3077

Click here for the distributors of Cafe Rebelde Zapatista

And click here for wikinfo on Kopi Luak / Civet Coffee