Gives Shitty Coffee New Meaning

Get this: my office mate alerted me to this style of coffee while being my usual coffee-snob self. Didn't believe her, should have b/c she's from Colombia. A coffee snob too but drowns her coffee in cream, what a waste of good coffee. And good cream.

Kopi Luwak coffee comes from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, an area well-known for its excellent coffee. Also native to the area is a small civit-like animal called a Paradoxurus. These little mammals live in the trees and one of their favorite foods is the red, ripe coffee cherry. They eat the cherries, bean and all. While the bean is in the little guy's stomach, it undergoes chemical treatments and fermentations. The bean finishes its journey through the digestive system, and exits. The still-intact beans are collected from the forest floor, and are cleaned, then roasted and ground just like any other coffee.

One must wonder about the circumstances that brought about the first cup of Kopi Luwak coffee. Who would think to (or even want to) collect and roast beans out of animal feces? Perhaps a native figured it was easier to collect the beans from the ground this way, rather than having to work harder and pick them from the trees? We'll likely never know. But because of the strange method of collecting, there isn't much Kopi Luwak produced in the world. The average total annual production is only around 500 pounds of beans.

Because of the rarity of this coffee, the price is quite outrageous. If you can find a vendor, the current cost for a pound of Kopi Luwak is around $300 or more.

And elsewhere I found this:

Happily a company in Vietnam named Trung Nguyen has found a way to synthetically reproduce this fantastic product through a patented process that mimics the original perfectly and at a much lower cost, only around $16 per pound roasted. We proudly bring you this and many other delicious coffee varieties produced in the highlands of Vietnam. Enjoy!