Heifervoyeur: Pardon Me Sir, But A Cat Pooped In Your Coffee

The most expensive coffee in the world is made of cat poop. Well, to be more precise, it's made from the dung of an Asian Palm Civet, a cousin to the mongoose that is native to Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Civets like to eat berries, and (being evolutionarily elegant) they choose the fat, juicy ones. Apparently, we humans have a more difficult time distinguishing the fat, juicy, ripe berries from dried up, rotting ones, and we must rely on civets to do this for us.

After the civets have defecated, Indonesian farmers sort through their poop, wash it off, roast it, brew it, call it "Kopi Luwak," and sell it to to captains of industry for upwards of $600/lb. Well, they probably sell it to a coffee company for a lot less than it's worth, but who's counting?

A captain of industry friend who has sampled Kopi Luwak tells me that it's mild and aromatic at the same time; well worth the $30/cup price tag. He assures me that the washing process is thorough and that it hardly looks like cat poop at all.

Further shoddy online research suggests that the aroma may be derived from the anal glands of the civet, which excrete a musky pheromone meant to attract civets of the opposite sex. It is not yet possible to buy coffee made from the feces of gay civets. I checked.

While Kopi Luwak has been popular with yuppies since the early 1990s, it reached national attention through a scene in the 2007 masterpiece The Bucket List. And now, through a feature article, the New York Times is calling attention to the economic and environmental impact of farming palm civets for their poop. If this concerns you, you may consider joining the boycott.

If it doesn't, before you go rushing off to demand that your local Starbucks stock Kopi Luwak, be warned that there are a number of copycat varietals out there. People will stoop to anything to make their coffee taste like cat poop, including but not limited to gluing poop to the beans themselves. One woman in Pittsburgh trained her cat to defecate directly into her coffee pot. The cat felt used.