good grief. Or, dare I say it: holy shit! Talk about the Emperor's New Clothes!!
Apparently the Indonesian island of Sumatra boasts one of the more unique coffees in the world.
Right up there with African Monkey Poo Coffee.
There is a small creature which lives in Sumatra, somewhat like a civet, more like a small cat. The natives call them Luwaks. These little guys live in trees, and one of their favourite treats is the ripe red coffee cherry.
Once the cherry(and the precious bean it contains) is eaten, it wends its way through the digestive tract, thereby being broken down by various unmentionable chemicals and hence fermented.
Locals pluck the clusters from the forest floor, clean and roast them and voilà ... gourmet coffee. Coffee which, believe it or not, goes at upwards of $300 a pound.
I'm not sure whether the first person to pick up one of these little clusters of civet poo (being gentle for the squeamish here) and decide to add it to water and drink it was insane, or a connoisseur par excellence. Not to mention possibly one hell of an entrepreneur.
Whoa, that's way to much Franglais in one paragraph!
Some wags have even gone so far as to ponder what happens when you industrialise the entire process, à la Western World. Surely there were originally just a few inspired locals with a mad gleam in their eyes following these monkey-cats around, waiting for them to complete the fermentation phase, and picking up the steaming offerings.
The results of brewing this were probably eye-wateringly hallucinogenic and enough to snap anyone into a magnicent start to any day.
But once demand picked up (even at $300US @ pound) you'd quickly realise you needed to contain the poor things and force-feed them coffee beans, just like The Colonel's chickens. What kind of second-rate shit would that get you?
Think I'll stick with the stuff grown on the wind-swept mountains of the world.
They do rather look almost like an Oh Henry bar, don't they?
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