If you’ve never heard of this stuff, I find the idea really interesting. File it under, “Who was the first person who thought of eating/drinking that?”
It might not be to everyone’s taste - and that’s not just because at £50 a cup it’s the most expensive coffee in the world.
The secret behind the special blend about to go on sale at an upmarket department store is that it is made from cats’ droppings.
While such an ingredient might leave many spluttering into their cups, Peter Jones thinks it is on to a winner.
For the rest of April, it is serving espressos, Americanos and lattes made from the droppings in its in-store coffee shop in Sloane Square, central London.
And for those who want the ultimate talking point over the after-dinner mints, the coffee beans are also on sale at £50 for 100 grams.
The store, part of the John Lewis partnership, has bought 60 packets of the exclusive blend of Jamaican Blue Mountain and the Kupi Luwak bean.
The bean is rare, with less than 450lb harvested each year.
The beans are extracted from the droppings of the palm civet, a cross between a cat and a monkey which lives in Indonesia.
The civets eat the soft coffee cherries, digest the fruit pulp and excrete the beans on the forest floor, because they cannot digest the beans.
Plantation workers then collect the beans, which are sold as Luwak coffee.
The civets are said to pick the best and ripest coffee berries.
It is also thought that their gastric juices may add to the flavour.
The saddest thing is that I’m such a coffee nut that I’d probably try it. People say the stuff is excellent.
When I die, assuming I go to heaven and assuming he’s there, I want to meet the first man to eat a lobster.
Must’ve been really desperate.
Hilary, I’d have figured you’d want to meet the first person to sample a squid.
Or are you certain he’s in Hell?
And all this time, I thought that was what all coffee was made of …
(Victor ducks)
Oysters too.
Have you ever taken a bite out of an oyster and then looked?
Yeesh!
How can anyone believe Darwinism is true while staring into the gooey grey ugliness of a half-bitten oyster?
BTW: It’s important to eat squid. Shows who’s got the evolutionary upper hand. I eat squid every chance I get.
(and I’m with you Victor.)
Steve:
Ignore the coffee-rejecting pagans. They have chosen to walk apart from us and delight in persisting in their error, kneeling before their false god Earlgrey.
We can only hope the scales will fall from their eyes before it is too late.
And good on the squid consumption. Very fussable lightly fried in olive oil.
Coffee is the stuff white people like.
Is that the best you can do–idolater?
I just keep a jar of caffeine pills on my desk.
I had a summer job when I was about 17 once as the breakfast cook in a little cafe. It was fun, actually, even though I had to get up a five am. I had a whole raft of appreciative, quiet, polite and very nice early morning regulars who always said nice things about my cooking and I was the only one there in the mornings, doing the food, cleaning up and doing the cash. People usually knew to help themselves to extra coffee when I was busy. Very companionable. But it was a lot of work and one had to be really ON to do it at that hour of the day. So I appreciated the fact that the management kept an amply stocked jar of chocolate covered espresso beans on the counter and told me that I could help myself at will.
By ten am when I was finished my day, I usually felt like I could run up telephone poles. I might have tried it once or twice; I can’t quite remember. for some reason the later part of the days that summer are all a blur in my memory.
never never spend a morning eating chocolate-covered espresso beans and then go watch a Jackie Chan movie. Because you really can’t run up walls. Neither can Jackie.