Off the Edge of the Map: Cat Poop Coffee

What coffee drinker out there hasn’t stopped at the local convenience store to grab a quick cuppa joe, only to take a sip, spit it out and exclaim “this tastes like crap!” while tossing the offending item into the nearest trash receptacle?

Piece of advice … next time, hold on to your $0.99 cup of crap because it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the world’s most expensive cat-poop-coated coffee beans.

Yep. I said cat poop. And yep, God help me, I am serious.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the New York Times has to say:

.. .these beans are found in the droppings of the civet, a nocturnal, furry, long-tailed catlike animal that prowls Southeast Asia’s coffee-growing lands for the tastiest, ripest coffee cherries. The civet eventually excretes the hard, indigestible innards of the fruit — essentially, incipient coffee beans — though only after they have been fermented in the animal’s stomach acids and enzymes to produce a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.

As connoisseurs in the United States, Europe and East Asia have discovered civet coffee in recent years, growing demand is fueling a gold rush in the Philippines and Indonesia, the countries with the largest civet populations.

 Now if that didn’t make you cringe just the slightest – how about this? 

Competition is touching off fierce debates. What is real civet coffee, anyway? Does the civet’s choice of beans make the coffee? Or is it the beans’ journey through the animal’s digestive tract? Can the aroma, fragrance and taste of beans from the droppings of a caged civet ever be as tasty as those from its wild cousin?

The price for a package pound of civet-treated coffee? About $227.

Still don’t believe it? Here’s what About.com’s UrbanLegends had to say.

As a citizen of the world, I’m delighted at just about any opportunity for impoverished villagers and small business owners to better their economic futures. As an animal lover, I am further delighted by just about any reason a species might find itself fiercely protected by humans that share its natural habitat.

But people paying hundreds of dollars to drink cat-poop coffee?!?Really?!? It sounds like a bad joke to me.

At the same time, I’m wondering if there’s a business opportunity in here for some enterprising cat owner. Would it work? Can your garden variety housecat’s stomach juices create a master blend???

 No. You know what? Scratch that. Drop off or mail me a pound of your favorite coffee beans, wait a few days, and I’ll “make” you a special blend for half the market price of Civet Coffee.

… sounds like a good deal to me!