The men in my family are coffee aficionados. (Coffee snobs, we call them.) They go beyond searching out the best gourmet coffee - oh no. These guys have coffee roasters. They buy green beans, and carefully roast the beans to get the perfect cup of coffee. They have about every coffee maker known to man, from your basic drip pots, french presses, vacuum pots, Turkish pots, etc. They know their coffee.
So for my dad's birthday my brother got him some very rare, very expensive "kopi luwak" coffee. Do you know about this stuff? Basically it is made from coffee beans that have been eaten and passed through the digestive tract of the luwak, or Asian Palm Civet. Apparently while being "passed through", many of the proteins that make coffee bitter are pulled out. "Luwak Coffee is indisputably the world's rarest and most exclusive coffee." Ummm, okay.
Even though they like to roast their coffee beans themselves, my brother got my dad pre-roasted beans, because if you buy the luwak beans green, you have to, er... clean them first. Nice.
I'm not a coffee lover anyway, so I can't imagine trying this. My parents, brother, and SIL (who is squeamish) tried it. They said it was good. "It didn't taste at all poopish!"
I just find it so funny. Who first thought of trying coffee that first went through an animal's digestive system? Was there a coffee shortage? And would you get the same effect if you fed the coffee cherries to say your dog or cat? Or perhaps coffee cherries are tasty, and would make a nice snack for yourself - like the day before you wanted to brew up some "homemade" gourmet coffee! Talk about recycling!!
Brave enough to give it a try? You can find it here.
