Cafe Noir

While we were in Denmark, Randy fell in love with Merrild's Cafe Noir. Cafe Noir was the first brand of coffee we bought - by chance actually, while we were living in Denmark. Since then, Randy has always compared coffee to that of Cafe Noir and has even had me on the look-out for any kind of coffee that was similar to it.

About two years ago, one of our friends from Denmark visited Texas and before he left on his trip, he asked Randy if there was anything he wanted from Denmark. Randy asked for Cafe Noir coffee and the question back to Randy was "What style?"

Well, since Randy doesn't do the food shopping around here and hasn't a clue as to what would be the appropriate style of coffee to request, when given his options of "whole Beans, ground, instant" he chose instant.

So, when Jørgen shows up with two jars of instant coffee, I was thinking to myself, "What?!" It was only later that I found out that Randy told him "instant."

Well, as you can imagine, the instant coffee is... well,... it's instant and no offense to instant coffee drinkers out there, but... I like freshly ground coffee and there is no comparison.

Fast forward to this past weekend... we were in IKEA (as was the entire population of Central Texas) and I spotted a flat of ground coffee manufactured for IKEA. So, we bought a bag of it, hoping it resembled the flavor of Cafe Noir. And, ya know what? It did, in a Swedish kind of way. In fact, it was distributed from Helsingborg, Sweden, which is the only city we visited while we were living in Denmark.

So, Randy now has a way to get his beloved Scandinavian coffee.

(By the way... what did I ask for when our friend Jørgen came to Texas? Danish tabloids, Haribo Click Mix and Pickwick Christmas Tea.)