Monkey Spit Coffee, Anyone?

It used to be easy to make a cup of coffee. You just went to the cupboard, took out your can of Folgers ground coffee, and percolated it. You poured it, added your sugar and cream if you wanted and started working on your caffeine buzz.

Well, something happened between 1965 and now. We stopped being interested in Folgers in our cup and went looking for excitement, flavor, cutting edge coffee.

Apparently we found it.

The Palm Civet is an Asian wild cat. Just like the rest of us it has a coffee habit, but in a slightly different way. It eats the berries from the coffee plant and the seeds (beans) pass through it's system undigested. The enzymes in the stomach of the cat break down the proteins in the beans which are what cause the coffee to be bitter.

Conveniently each civet uses a particular area as a latrine so all that workers have to do is go and collect the droppings daily to get the coffee beans. Once the beans are collected they are washed and lightly roasted so as not to ruin the complex flavor of the beans, which is described as extremely chocolaty.

Kopi Luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world, selling for 120-600 USD per pound. It is still quite rare although some farmers have started keeping the civets in farm situations to be able to collect the beans more easily and reliably. It is produced in Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and the Philippines.

Kopi Muntjac is a coffee that is also processed by animals.

The Muntjac, or Barking Deer, is a deer found in Southeast Asia. It is one of the oldest known species of deer, and it too, creates an unusually flavored coffee. Like the civet, the deer eats the coffee berries and the beans pass, undigested through it's system and are collected in it's droppings. Unlike the civet the Barking Deer is not being farmed so the coffee is, if anything, more rare.

The Formosan Rock Monkey is coffee addicted as well. These little monkeys eat ripe coffee berries and spit out the beans. Farmers then gather the beans to roast and make into a unique and delicious brew, which sells for over 50 USD a pound and is said to taste like vanilla.

Apparently a farmer noticed one of the monkeys spitting out the beans and he decided to try to collect them and process them and see what happened.

I think that I will, personally, just stick with regular coffee beans with the rare foray into flavored coffee for excitement. I really like a nice strong cup of coffee in the morning when I get up but I don't think I am up for some of these more unique blends.