Great opportunity for poop-lickers

I am referring, of course, to the folks in Indonesia who lick civet poop to determine the quality of the excreted coffee beans known as kopi luwak. These unique coffee beans (unique in terms of where they've been) are the most expensive ones in the world -- selling for as much as $227USD. I got a little excited when I discovered a website selling it for $21, but then I saw that it was for a single serving. No, really, a true coffee connoisseur will drink this stuff and tell you it tastes smooth and chocolaty. Let me tell you, that phrase will never mean the same to me again.

But back to the poop-lickers. In an article in the New York Times, Norimitsu Onishi was interviewing a civet coffee harvester who inspected a "batch" of beans and licked a bean, explaining that "real civet coffee beans should have lost their natural sweetness and acquired a rough texture." I expect anything I find in such a situation, whether from a civet or otherwise, would have lost natural sweetness and acquired a rough texture, but maybe that is just an incorrect assumption.

Being the pricey food item they are, naturally civet coffee beans are subject to counterfeiting. Most likely you were already considering a way for you to create such an item in your own home. Perhaps in the bathroom. Coffee companies who purchase kopi luwak from harvesters have come across "regular beans glued to unidentified dung." I'm not sure, but if you're looking for a job in this field, gluing beans to dung may be a step up from poop-licking.

Another poor substitute are the spat-up beans from bats who merely chewed on the coffee flowers and didn't actually consume the beans. But that must be an obviously inferior substitute to you by now. They certainly would be smooth and chocolaty, eh?

One last warning to the connoisseur looking for the very finest civet poop beans (see why they call it kopi luwak?) is that some bean harvesters now use farmed civets rather than looking around on the forest floor for cage-free excrement. There is some disagreement about whether the wild version is of higher quality. I haven't found (because I haven't looked for) an opinion from PETA on the subject of caged civets, but it probably would not be focused on the quality of the pooped beans. They are likely to be more concerned about the eating of civets, which are considered a delicacy in Indonesia. (Man, if I hear "considered a delicacy" one more time...)

Does the thought of caged animals who enjoy a steady diet of coffee freak you out as much as it does me? Now I am picturing the cubicle-bound computer programmers over at Microsoft, where the coffee flows freely from their gigantic Starbucks coffee machines that grind fresh beans and brew up one cup at a time in every kitchen. If we could get those geeks to eat the coffee flowers and... never mind.