Thirty Bucks for a Cup of Coffee - Don’t Try This With Diet Coke
Someone over at Energy Fiend clearly understands the blessing and curse that is caffeine:
Now, I’m campaigning for the office to pick up the tab for some kopi luwak, $600-a-pound brew that owes its unearthly smoothness to each bean’s first passing through the digestive system of a civet, an Indonesian mammal that looks like it’s half cat and half rat.
In the animals’ stomachs, enzymes in the gastric juices massage the beans, smoothing off the harsh edges that make coffee bitter and produce caffeine jitters. Humans then separate the greenish-brown beans from the rest of the dung, and once a thin outer layer is removed, they are ready for roasting. The result is a delicacy with a markup so steep it would make a drug dealer weep.
The drawback is that civet coffee loses a fair amount of its caffeine in the (ahem) process. So much for medicinal value.
Del.icio.us, 
Digg, 
Technorati, 
Furl, 
Reddit,
Spurl
RSS
Josef Villanasco said,
on July 18th, 2007 at 6:42 am
Jay Ferrari said,
on July 18th, 2007 at 8:13 am
Josef, maybe we can have an office civet? We can make our own kopi luwak and save big on overhead.
Jill said,
on July 20th, 2007 at 11:48 am
I loved the Dave Barry column about this coffee that came out back in 1999. Here’s a link to one place where you can read it:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1371941/posts.
My favorite line is when he orders some because of course, he MUST try it, and when it looks just like regular coffee he worries that it IS just regular coffee, and he’s being ripped off. And then he observes, “What kind of world is this when you worry that people might be ripping you off by selling you coffee that was NOT pooped out by a weasel?”