This Coffee Tastes Like Crap!
The Los Angeles Times today is reporting today on a rare kind of coffee - kopi luwak that apparently goes for as much as $30 per serving in swanky Asian haunts. This fine and delicate brew gets its refined flavor not from the tender and methodical production on the coffee plantation, but from an Indonesian, arboreal mammal known as a wild civet who eats the ripe, red coffee beans from the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees and then crap the beans out. The beans are then lovingly extracted from the civet poop, roasted, and then offered at steep prices.
Apparently, the enzymes in the civet's stomach break down some of the proteins that make coffee bitter. They also reduce the level of caffeine in the bean.
OK, I suppose its no more disgusting than casu frazigu cheese, a rotten cheese that ships with live maggots in it - so foul that the Italian government has outlawed it, though its still prized by gourmands nonetheless. What a world, what a world. I guess I'm a culinary luddite since the edge of my gastronomical envelope stops at chocolate covered crickets.