Wandering through Urban Fare, our local over-priced grocery store for foods snobs, Ashley pulled me aside to see the latest thing in coffee. She’d seen the coffee on the local news the evening before, but thought the product was a hoax and decided she had to see it for herself. And there it was: coffee, fresh from the cat’s ass.
Technically speaking, they don’t call it “cat’s ass coffee”, although they might as well. The official name, Kopi Luwak, roughly translates to “luwak’s coffee”, where a luwak is a Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, also called a Toddy cat. The coffee originated in Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi, and is distinct from other coffees in that it isn’t produced in the traditional fashion, where the coffee cherry is picked, the coffee bean extracted and dried. Instead, this type of coffee is produced when a luwak eats a coffee cherry and, uh, poops it out. The expelled bean is collected, cleaned (I hope) and sold for the low low price of $600 CDN a pound.
Reading the comments about this coffee from coffee aficionados is funnier than anything network television is likely to produce this fall. In one article on the coffee, Richard Karno, former owner of The Novel Cafe in Santa Monica, stated:
“It’s the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. It’s really good, heavy with a caramel taste, heavy body. It smells musty and jungle-like green, but it roasts up real nice…It has a little of everything pleasurable in all coffees: earthy, musty tone, the heaviest bodied I’ve ever tasted. It’s almost syrupy, and the aroma is very unique.”
Caramel taste? Earthy? I’m lucky that our dear friend Richard didn’t add the word “nutty” to his description of the coffee’s taste, otherwise I’d be in hospital right now suffering from a full body hernia. The aroma is “musty”? I’ll bet it’s musty. Nothing like traveling through the digestive tract of a jungle animal to give yourself an odor that’ll keep Coco Channel busy trying to camouflage it for the next fifty years.
People really fool themselves. This is the same brand of idiocy that convinces cigar connoisseurs to think they’re displaying their sophistication by partaking in a distinguished tradition, instead of realizing they’re sucking on a roll of dried leaves that’s been lit on fire. And paying a lot of money for the privilege to boot.
Suckers.