Civet cat coffee
Palm Civet

CANBERRA – Cafe-crazy Australians in the last decade have embraced coffee in all its forms, but they’ve saved the most expensive — and excremental — for last. Kopi Luwak, made in neighboring Indonesia from coffee beans excreted by native civet cats, is reputedly the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee, painstakingly extracted by hand from the animals’ forest droppings. When roasted, the resulting beans sell for around US$1,000 a kilogram ($1365/kg) and brew into an earthy, syrupy, coffee acknowledged by connoisseurs as one of the world’s finest.

Kopi Luwak joins a booming coffee scene in Australia, which has seen consumption grow from 300 grams per person in 1939, to 2.4 kilograms a head, or 1.26 billion cups a year worth AUS$3 billion ($3.38 billion) in sales. Everyone calls it cat poo coffee,” cafe owner Michelle Sharpe told the Australian Associated Press. “People who willingly pay the US$50 are uplifted by the thrill of the experience,” her husband Allan Sharpe said.

“It’s as good as my private life is bad. This is the kind of coffee you renounce your religion and sell your child for,” one taster quoted by AAP said.

    Nobody reports why the civet cats even eat the coffee
    beans.
    Oops, yes they do.

The palm civet prowls about the coffee plantations of Indonesia, seeking out and eating only the ripest, most primo coffee “cherries” (the sweet pulpy fruit encasing the coffee beans).

    From The Straight Dope.



  1. Mr. Fusion says:

    I call Civet Shit on this one.

  2. George Smith says:

    Stephen Fry gave Prince Charles some of this, as a birthday present, a while back.

  3. edwinrogers says:

    Sorry Mr Fusion, Civet and also Dog coffee are indeed delicacies in Asia. Check out Anthony Bourdain. The long digestive tract of omnivores perfectly slow roasts coffee beans. Also, visit your doctor when you return to the USA for a flush and lube – intestinal and gut parasites are rife in Asia, this has to be the fastest way to catch tapeworm

  4. bill says:

    Uh… Peets French Roast is just fine by me…

  5. Rob says:

    Sweet Maria’s (my favorite source for coffee beans) sells something similar that they consider to be better. It comes out of a bird instead of a cat.

  6. Mathew says:

    edwinrogers; I’m no doctor, and I am certainly not rushing out to buy some Civet Roasted Coffee beans (I get mine from a grower in Papua New Guinea), but really, how is a tapeworm going to; Insert itself into a coffee bean, survive the roasting process, survive one grinding the beans and then survive the boiling water passed through the grounds AND get into my cup?

    Perhaps I’m missing something.

  7. Riscy says:

    #6, I think it would be possible to ingest the eggs, although I would have thought that hot water would be enough to kill them. Perhaps the cat poo coffee has a different preparation method, considering it is already roasted and ground from the action of the gut.

  8. Angel H. Wong says:

    CIVETS ARE NOT CATS, they’re just cat like animals.

    Mind you, I prefer organic Honduran coffe.

  9. Blues says:

    This all started with two guys in a bar. One brags to the other that he can sell anything to anyone. The other guy says, “You can’t sell shit!”
    The rest is history.

  10. JB says:

    #3, the voyage through the digestive tract does not “slow roast” the beans. All it does is remove the outside cherry, much like the washing/drying process does that all other coffee goes through. Perhaps the only difference in the cup is from the selection process of the beans – it’s done by a cat instead of a human.

  11. AdmFubar says:

    Lark’s vomit!!!!!??? It doesnt say anything about lark’s vomit!!!

  12. MacBandit says:

    It’s in the Raccoon family.

  13. Mr. Fusion says:

    With all due respect, I still ain’t drinking anything that came out of some animals butt !!!

  14. Brian says:

    Hilarious…the only thing funnier than coffee snobs are wine snobs.

  15. Wayne Bradney says:

    Catpoo-chino indeed

  16. Esteban says:

    These people give coffee snobs a bad name.

  17. Jägermeister says:

    Just proves that everything can be sold with some clever advertisement… 😉

  18. Dr. Dabbles says:

    I am fortunate to have been able to sample this, and let me tell you it was far and away the _best_ coffee I have ever had in my life.

  19. Cursor_ says:

    This is proof positive that coffee drinkers are actually addicts and will drink any sh*t to get their fix.

    No different than crack and horse addicts.

    Cursor_

  20. TheGlobalWarmer says:

    This stuff sells for 100.00 per cup in NYC.

    The real question is who was the first person to say to themselves: “Hmmmm, I see coffee beans in that poop pile. I think I’ll grind ’em and brew ’em and see what it tastes like.”

  21. ethanol says:

    I am with TheGlobalWarmer (#21) on this one. Who looks at a pile of feces and thinks, “Hmm, I should make some coffee from that!”?!?!?!

  22. estacado says:

    I’ve tried it while on holiday tour in Bali. It tastes just like any other cup of coffee. Maybe they didn’t want to give the good stuff for free to tourists, so they just said it was Luwak even though it wasn’t.

    I was the only one on the tour who knew what Kopi Luwak was, and how expensive it is, so I was the only one who asked for a taste of it. However the tour guide avoided telling the tourists that it was extracted from civet poo, he just said that they are beans that a species of civets called Luwak like to eat.

  23. Angel H. Wong says:

    #22

    They’re called cheap entrepenours.

  24. hhopper says:

    The best coffee is cold brewed to concentrate, then kept refrigerated until used.

  25. 14 – You’ve never tried milk?

  26. ezTiki says:

    Horrible! But….as sick as it sounds I’d still try it!

  27. ZeOverMind says:

    I remember a similar story about a crappacino a few years ago: http://tinyurl.com/2e6nc9


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