Cattacino Please - Excreted Cat Coffee is No Shit

• Author: johnnymestizo
• Filed under: Food, Bar & Bistro, Technical Update
• Date: May 1,2008
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Back on the 10th of April 2008, ‘cat poo coffee’ hit the streets of London. Selling for £50 a cup they are made from a blend of Jamaican Blue Mountain and the rare Kopi Luwak bean.

Cat Coffee - An Explanation

Kopi Luwak beans are eaten and shat out by the Indonesian Civet Cat. Civets live in coffee plantations across South East Asia. They have a taste for ripe quality coffee berries.

The coffee cats digestive system utilises enzymes to break down the flesh of the fruit before the animals expels the bean. Workers collect beans from the plantation floor, wash away the dung and roast them.

Who Ate Shit Beans First?

Centuries ago when villagers worked in compulsory Dutch plantations times were rough. From day to day they picked and picked handing all their efforts to their colonial masters. Essentially, the villagers took advantage of their feline friends to smuggle coffee beans out of plantations, harvest their dung and with considerable preparation the cattacino was born!

Is My Kilo of Cat Coffee the Pure Shit?

You gotta love it. You hype up your product and the world catches on. Then along come the counterfeits and dodgy suppliers…

With thanks to people like the Canadian food scientist Massimo Marcone the quality of cat coffee market can be confirmed. Studying cat poo like bullet markets he spends his time searching for striations under an electron microscope to confirm who excreted it. The results of Massimo’s studies found that kopi luwak drinkers should be wary of contaminated shit.

“About 42% of all the kopi luwaks that are presently on sale are either adulterated or complete fakes, unfortunately,” he said.

Why Are We Talking About Cat Poo?

Money. Strong coffee, marketed as super-rare, from a finite resource and delivered as a luxurious package to anticipating consumers.

A pound of their droppings yields less than 5 ounces of beans. Roasting reduces the quantity by an additional 20%. With just 500 to 1,000 pounds of the real thing coming on the global market each year, demand quickly drives up the price.

The media has been drumming this up for the past 6 months and now their is a high demand for curious coffee addicts. Rumours even have this commodity at $US 3000 a kilo!

Scientist Verdict

Real kopi luwak has a top note of rich, dark chocolate, with secondary notes that are musty and earthy, the scientist said.

Indonesian Verdict

An Indonesian coffee lover described the scent as the smell of moist earth after a rainfall, with hints of vanilla, that teases the palate for hours after the cup is empty.

Barista Verdict

We did taste the coffee. We paid AUD$50 for a two cup pot. I — as did the others I was travelling with, tried to savour every sip and turn it into one huge sensory assessment. It didn’t take long (or many sips) for me to decide that the coffee was neither clean or particularly interesting in a good way. It was interesting — we had consensus on that — but the characteristics in the cup that we were all experiencing weren’t that pleasant. The coffee was musty, it had a fermented taint (and a distinct poo note) and reminiscent of coffee that we would have discarded during a cupping because of perceived defect levels.

Johnny Mestizo Verdict

I’m keen to try authentic Kopi Luwak coffee and for the price I will down the full cup. Curiousity and hype will get me this far. However, once the honeymoon is over and the shitty dirt after taste kicks in I will be more than happy to return to my Farmers Union Iced Coffee.