Unwashed beans of kopi luwak, the world's costliest coffee.
Q: What is the main source of supply of the world’s most expensive coffee?
A: Cat poop.
Now I don’t want you to think that any old alley cat’s droppings taste wonderful if steeped in hot water and served in a china cup. I’m pretty sure they don’t, although, to be honest with you, I’ve never put it to the test and never intend to.
For one thing, for the deluxe coffee you need a particular kind of a cat. They’re called palm civet cats and they grow wild in certain parts of southeast Asia. Then it’s best if you start looking for them in the vicinity of large coffee plantations, because once you have your stock of civet cats, what you want to feed them on is ripe coffee berries from the trees.
That makes the civet cats happy because they love the taste of coffee berries, and it then makes you happy because after the berries have traveled through the animal’s digestive tract the pulpy part of the berry is digested away and what is left is the hard, indigestible coffee bean, which you can sell for as much as $227 a pound.
Something else happens to the bean on its way to the litter box. The bean is fermented in the bowels of the animal with its enzymes and stomach acids. What the coffee drinker gets after it is roasted and ground is a brew that is described as “smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.” And, oh, yes, worth a couple of hundred bucks a pound.
However, you must exercise care. Unscrupulous farmers have been caught gluing undigested coffee beans to just any old civet cat BMs, and the resulting cuppa is not said to be worth very much at all.
And — yes — here too, I think I’ll just have some tea.
some call me Tim says:
Ulrg. That may just possible be worse than the preceding bisque story. I think I’ll stick to my Folgers , thanks.
May 1, 2010, 5:08 amShakatany says:
I can\’t help wondering who was the first person to make coffee out of the remnants of cat poop? Why oh why did s/he do it?
May 1, 2010, 2:04 pmSara says:
See, this is why its better to drink diet coke. You know that everything in DC is entirely organic free, so there is no possible way that it came from the digestive tract of a civet.
May 1, 2010, 3:00 pmPat Butler says:
No wonder the Mormons don’t drink coffee.
May 1, 2010, 10:52 pmqiihoskeh says:
Fortunately, the world’s most expensive coffee isn’t necessarily the best. I doubt the cheap but good locally packaged coffee is processed using any kind of cat or even rat (although I wouldn’t put it past the cockroaches to provide input; they get into everything).
May 1, 2010, 10:55 pmBill Goodwin says:
All memory of these facts must be erased from the Memory of Man.
May 2, 2010, 10:41 amJohn H says:
Seeing as how I loathe coffee anyway, the prospects of me drinking ‘cat poop’ coffee are rather remote. In fact, you couldn’t pay me enough money to drink that ‘crap’…
May 3, 2010, 1:26 pmBruce says:
I have to think all of these weird food concoctions have to be borne out of necessity. I can just see some 19th century British soldiers lost in the jungles of India, with their head officer going through caffeine withdrawal and demanding a pot of coffee. Suddenly they find a nice batch of well-preserved coffee beans embedded in–cat poop? “Rinse it off and the old bastid’ll nevah know!” And then the stunt backfires on the soldiers when it turns out they’ve discovered a new delicacy, and have to search for coffee-laced cat poop for the remainder of their jungle excursion.
Kind of like eating rotten milk (cheese, yogurt) in Europe, or raw fish in Japan, only moreso.
May 3, 2010, 6:31 pmDavid Moles says:
I’ve had it. It was… pleasantly mild. Not something I’d pay $10/cup for more than once, but I’m not a connoisseur.
May 5, 2010, 3:37 amLars says:
Niggling, I realize, but civets aren’t cats. They belong to a different family. Related to the Felidae, true, but not cats, nonetheless.
No true cat would eat a berry anyway.
May 6, 2010, 7:00 pmAnton Sherwood says:
Wikipedia says of the Asian palm civet (not ‘civet cat’, which is yet another thing or several): “In Indonesia it is known as ‘Luwak’, and involved in production of Kopi Luwak, an expensive type of coffee.”
Involved! Heh.
August 8, 2010, 2:42 pm