Can you even imagine that the 'Most Expensive Coffee In The World' comes from poop! Well, well - even I was a bit shocked when I got to know about this, but then I had a sip and was wow-ed!
Regarded as a luxury delicacy, Kopi Luwak that originated in Indonesia and is heavily produced in the region gets its name from 'coffee' which is 'Kopi' in Indonesian and 'Luwak' meaning 'civet cats' who are the actual “producers” of this coffee!
These civets are actually Asian Palm Civets that are native to South and Southeast Asia who consume the coffee cherries and the coffee beans are collected from the partially digested cherries in their poop.
How Expensive Is The Coffee?
A cup of civet coffee costs between $35 to $100 and will cost you a whopping $100 to $600 for a kilo!
A Short History Of The Poop Coffee:
Coffee, that was introduced to Indonesia by the Dutch in 1600s eventually resulted in the “Cultuurstelsel” method of cultivation where the native coffee growers were forbidden from picking cherries for personal consumption. The coffee deprived locals soon found a way around it. They found out that the cat-like animal called civets would pick up the juiciest cherries and after consumption leave behind undigested beans that the locals eventually started collecting the beans, cleaning them and then roasting them – that’s how the locals started brewing their own coffee. Eventually the plantation owners caught wind of their actions and realized that the new brew was way superior than what they were getting earlier.
How Does The Coffee Bean Turn Better After The Civets Ingests It?
The smooth taste of the coffee could be owed to the unique gut microbiome of the civet cat that affects the characteristic physical properties and metabolite content of the “cat poop beans”. The protein of the cherries consumed by the civets are broken down by the digestive enzymes into short peptide bonds and also frees some of the beans’ amino acids. And the result you get is a softer and smoother bean, that you ground into a fine taste coffee.
Controversy Surrounding The Coffee
When something as fine and expensive hits the market, automatically the demand for it surges, that results in production pressure. In order to meet the global demand, factory farms were built for civets where they are caged and, in some cases, even force-fed coffee cherries. Because of the extent of this cruelty that surfaced and was widely shamed, the government had banned the “industrialized” production of the beans. But there are still places where the locals continue to run the illegal production on the civet poop coffee!
While I had tried a sip of the coffee to get over my “mental block” of trying “poop” which is actually undigested beans, I couldn’t help by wonder, if its really worth putting the animals through unnecessary health hazards and trauma to meet the need to drink something exotic when it could as well be collected in small quantity from the droppings of wild ones and would still remain equally exotic!!!
What are your thoughts on this? Please share.
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