Tag: coffee

where to buy coffee made from poop

A while back we wrote about a very expensive coffee made from poop, also known as “Kopi Luwak”.   Now Think Geek is offering it for purchase and consumption in the U.S., calling it Civet Crap Choice Coffee.  It costs $34.99, for 5-10 servings.  Kinda pricey for coffee, and gross to think about, but, hey, it’s rare and exotic and unique!  Restaurants sell this for $50 per cup!

I will not personally be conducting any research / taste-testing on this coffee.  I don’t drink coffee, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to drink coffee made from beans that a wild animal pooped.   If any of you reading this have tried it, leave a comment explaining the “complex flavors” and “highly exotic” flavor.

If you go to the website and see the package it comes in, it’s funny how they felt led to put “edible” on the front of the package…  And it’s rare because “only 500 KGs of this rarity are found each year”.  You know why?  People have to find poop from this animal, collect it, and remove the coffee beans from it.   Then they make coffee from it, for you to drink.

what is locust bean gum?

Do you ever look at the ingredients of the pre-prepared foods you eat?   Occasionally I do.  And thus begins our story.

My wife recently acquired a coupon for a free package of Starbucks’ caramel macchiato ice cream.  It’s a mix of vanilla and coffee ice cream, with swirls of caramel.  I don’t care much for coffee, but she liked it.   We happened to look at the ingredients on the back of the label, and noticed that the last ingredient was “locust bean gum”.  I don’t know what that is, but the name of it doesn’t sound appealing.

Normally the lower-tier ingredients have scientific names, such that the average consumer has no idea what it stands for (and is too lazy to bother looking it up).   But with a name like locust bean gum, that just opens the door to a lot of questions.  Let’s start with, “What does that mean?”  Is it locusts ground up into beans, or do the locusts eat the beans and then “extract” the gum (a la a certain coffee), or is it locust-flavored beans?  I have no idea, apart from rampant speculation.

So it’s time for some research*.  I found that it’s a galactomannan consisting of a B-D-mannopyranose backbone with 6 branchpoints linked to a-D-galactose.  A detailed explanation of what that means is WAY beyond the scope of this article.  However, a quick summary in English is that it retards ice crystal growth by forming a structured gel at a solid/liquid interface.  I suppose it has to do with the texture and viscosity of the ice cream.  But that still doesn’t answer where it comes from.

But I’m not sure I want to know…  Sometimes it’s good to not ask too many questions.  Just enjoy your ice cream…  🙂

* My research consisted of a single search and looking at one link on the first page of results.

coffee made from poop

I saw an article over at Beppo’s Blog about the world’s most expensive coffee, and it’s a story that is most definitely random and stupid (yet true).  This coffee is called (or Civet coffee), and it is made from coffee berries that have been eaten and pooped by a weasel-like animal.  Yeah, you heard that right — the animal eats the coffee berries, digests them, defecates them, and then someone collects the feces, and they make coffee from it.

The coffee berries are washed, and then given “only a light roast so as to not destroy the complex flavors that develop through the process”.  Think about that — the berries were digested and then pooped out by an animal, and they don’t want to destroy the flavors that developed through the process!  This is most definitely not for me!

Guess how much people pay for this crap coffee…  In processed form, between $120 and $600 per pound!  In coffee form, $50 per cup.

If you want to see a picture of how these berries look when they are collected, follow this link.  (Doesn’t it look like something you’d want to brew coffee with?)

One website that is promoting it said this about the flavor :

“It has earthy tones of natural processed Sumatra Mandheling. It has low acidity with a syrupy body. There’s something else there, a nuance in the flavor profile that I can’t describe, and when I’ve challenged others, no one else can either. It’s almost alien, a tiny little flavor note, highly exotic.”

Yeah, that little “nuance” / exotic flavor is POOP!  I just can’t believe people drink coffee made from crap!  Will people buy anything if it’s considered rare and exotic?

What is this world coming to?!?