For Gourmands: Digested Coffee Beans

A cafe in Knoxville, Tennessee is offering a new caffeinated delight. It's coffee made from beans that have been, shall we say, processed through the digestive tract of a small Southeast Asian mammal prior to brewing:

Kopi luwak is named after the animal that gives the coffee its … uh … full body. The bright-red coffee cherries are eaten by the luwak, which is a cat-like relative of the mongoose in Southeast Asia.

After a few hours of digestion, the beans come out the other end. They’re picked up off the forest floor, cleaned and roasted. Because of this “all natural” processing, the coffee is said to have a rich and heavy flavor, with hints of caramel or chocolate.

“It’s delicious, amazing,” said the coffee shop owner Sharif Harb. “There’s no other coffee like it — rich, almost syrupy.”

Link via Instapundit

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While the information in the blog is old news, I have ever so enjoyed the creativity shared by those commenting. Good stuff.

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Collecting coffee beans for this product has got to be incredibly expensive. I live in the U.S., and shipping it from Malaysia has got to be much of the price alone.

Maybe we could produce it domestically. Ship the beans up from Central America, and feed them to some other inexpensive animal. Or even unemployed humans.

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Isn't there another one where it's goats that eat the coffee, then poop it out.
I'm sorry but EW.
Just the fact that it was POO... POOOOOOO... I don't freakin care how "delicious" or chocolatey or whatever it is, that's just disgusting.

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There's a better alternative if you desire coffee processed through a digestive system. From Brazil comes "Jacu Bird Coffee". The jacu is a bird that coexists with coffee plantations and eats ripe beans, leaving processed coffee behind, since they're harvested from plantations that grow arabica beans instead of the less desirable robustas that they feed the civets, they start off with better coffee. Better, it HASN'T been touted on CSI or whatever, it doesn't sell for astronomical prices that kopi luwak brings, and it actually is a quite good coffee. google it.

MC
coffee nut