I beg your pardon? The most expensive coffee in the world comes from the gut of a cat!
Gourmets sometimes come up with strange ideas in their search for uniqueness. So they discovered some time ago, the so-called "cat coffee" for themselves. "Earthy, moldy, syrupy, mild and rich in jungle and chocolate undertones", this should taste. How do you like jungle? No matter.
Much more interesting is the history of this coffee. It is produced while weasel-like blotches, in Balinese "Luwaks", on nocturnal raids over tropical coffee plantations the cuddly tummy full of ripe and plump coffee cherries full.
Unfortunately, the Luwak can only digest the red skin and the pulp. The departed lands a short time later in granular piles on the plantation soil. Tadaa? there is the bean product.
At some point, an annoyed plantation owner made the most of this big problem for him: he was grinding his kopi? Indonesian for coffee? from the so-called Luwak beans. In short: the excrement. This tasted surprisingly good and so many locals began to produce small quantities Kopi Luwak for special occasions.
The happy ending: In the meantime, they can become really wealthy with the laboriously collected beans. One kilogram of the unroasted beans costs directly from the producers, still under 50 euros. In Europe, the green coffee then comes for around one hundred euros in the wholesale. The roasted beans are then retailed for over two hundred euros. Phew, not a bad profit margin.
And is that a happy ending for the animals that used to be hunted by the plantations? Yes and no. The view of the filthy mammon made the locals catch the luwaks and overfeed them with coffee cherries. Such a one-sided diet is not good for the Dchungel weasels. Meanwhile, there are already some coffee farmers who have adopted an ecological and animal welfare-friendly production of Kopi Luwak. And as with all other artificially produced food, you can taste it in the final product. And that's the real luxury.
