OK, maybe it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say this heralds the end of the world, but you have to admit it comes pretty darn close.
I read this story in the paper the other day. It’s about a pricey — $600 a pound — coffee called “kopi luwak.”
Kopi luwak apparently is derived from the Indonesian words that mean, “your coffee came from poop” or “I can’t believe they’re actually drinking this.”
Sweet, red coffee beans are devoured by a hungry critter called the Asian Palm Civet in Sumatra or Indonesia. It digests what it can, and then reintroduces the hard bean centers to the world after a 3-day, 4-night all-inclusive Caribbean cruise through its intestines.
The beans are picked out of the civet dung, hopefully washed, and then roasted to make the coffee.
Apparently, as the story tells it, enzymes in the civet’s belly do something to the beans to help smooth out the flavor and cut down on the caffeine jitters. Now, I would actually develop new jitters knowing that I was drinking something a weasel-creature’s intestines couldn’t digest, but people love it.
Gives you a whole new appreciation for Juan Valdez up there in the mountains picking beans by hand, doesn’t it? I just don’t think I could enjoy a piping hot cup of java that had served time in an Asian weasel.
If you’ve never seen a civet, the first thing you will notice — aside from how it looks like a drunk raccoon who has lost a bar fight — is its bugged-out eyes. This is no doubt from eating too many coffee beans. All that caffeine has permanently hopped this critter up. Civets look shifty and edgy. You get the feeling they would talk REALLY fast and say things like, “Hey, man, know where I can score a latte’?”I ain’t drinking no coffee from that guy’s dung! Maybe the finest pedigree pooch to win Westminster, but surely not a bar-brawling civet who looks like an electrocuted weasel!
Have we run out of all the normal stuff to eat and drink that we have to turn to animal excrement?
“When I need that little extra pick-me-up in the morning, I drink Llama urine with a pinch of jasmine. It gives me that little extra kick I need to get me going in the morning. Much smoother than bat guano.”
I just don’t think that if the instructions for preparing a food or drink include the word “defecate” that it’s something you should want to ingest. Don’t you wonder what the first person to invent this kind of coffee was thinking? Ten-to-one says he was drunk and it was a bet. “Dude, I bet you won’t drink brewed civet dung.”
Yet, somebody did. And now they’re selling it.
I know it’s a free country and all, but I think it’s time we pass legislation to ban spending money on such ridiculous expenses. Who will determine what is “unusual,” you ask? I could do it. And I would start with anything that comes out the backside of a critter.
There reaches a point where people have too much money. And this is one of those points. If you are so rich that you actually think about, or can afford, drinking kopi luwak, then it’s time you start donating to charity or at least finding a hobby.
As for me, I’m going to stick with my Cuban coffee, and I’ll sit out on my front porch in the morning knowing that while I might be about to witness the official end of the world, at least my coffee beans never saw the insides of a civet.