10 April 2008

OK, Fine. You've Got My Attention. Let's Get Into It.



Now you can say there's a reason your coffee tastes like shit!


So this story is making the rounds again. It's the tale about the world's most expensive coffee and how it's made from cat shit. No, really.

Last time this one made the rounds I didn't touch it. I left it alone. You know how I hate wacky news stories.

Here's the deal: the coffee comes from the Kupi Luwak bean. The what? Anyway, the bean is supposedly very rare, with less than 450 pounds of Kupi Luwak harvested each year.

So where does cat shit get involved you say? Apparently many Kupi Luwak beans are extracted from the droppings of the Indonesian palm civet which is a delicate cross between a cat and a monkey.

The civets eat the soft coffee cherries, digest the fruit pulp and then shit out the beans on the forest floor, because they cannot digest them. Plantation workers then collect the bean-filled turds, and voilĂ ! It's $100 a cup Luwak coffee! Good `til the last shitty brown drop!



My question is why not eliminate (pardon the pun) the middleman. Why not take the palm civet out of equation and just pick the beans themselves before the civets eat them all up?

Well apparently Indonesian plantation workers are a bunch of lazy sods and would rather pick up civet shit saying the civets pick the best and ripest coffee berries anyway. So instead of devising a way for humans to pick the best coffee beans, they wait for these cat-monkeys to eat them and shit them out. I hope that pays well, being a coffee mule.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

freakin hilarious

Anonymous said...

there are a lot fake luwak coffee now days..
so be carefull dont let yourself to be a victim.

we only sell the original, best and natural civet luwak coffee.

Our coffee come from natural civet not from pet civet in the cage.

www.luwakcivetcoffee.com

Anonymous said...

I hope the beans come from free range civets as there is nothing like drinking free range civet poo,