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From the Chicago Tribune, by John Kass
"Coffee that's good to the last dropping"
Published January 18, 2007
In the post-apocalyptic nightmare to come, I hope somebody saves a copy of this column, to put the blame for the fall of the West right where it belongs: on America's gourmet coffee fetish, which has led to $10 cups of coffee made from cat poop."It doesn't taste like what you think it tastes like," Brian Munro, manager and apprentice roast master at Coffee and Tea Unlimited in Minneapolis, said on Wednesday. "And it doesn't smell. You smell the roasted beans. It's a very rich cup of coffee. Using a coffee term, it's got a full body."Yes, indeed, Mr. Brew Master."It's roast master, not brew master," he corrected. "I'm apprentice to the roast master."They are not cats, exactly, they're civets, which is worse. A civet is a 10-pound cat with soft, pudgy hands. They creep through Indonesian and Ethiopian coffee fields at night, eating the fruit, swallowing the beans, as hapless peasants trudge behind them, gingerly collecting the undigested beans, perhaps singing a folk song or two about stupid North Americans, and ship them here, where it sells for $420 a pound.The delicacy is formally called Kopi Luwak coffee, and only about 500 pounds are made each year. Munro insists that it smells like coffee, not anything else, but read his words and see why the world's terrorists want to blow us to hell.They're agitated enough about our ways, what with blue jeans and Coke and blond women who vote. They may be laughing in some Indonesian cave after a day of lashing the peasants, using cash from American cat-poop coffee addicts to subsidize lavish lifestyles, replete with single malt whiskey and dancing girls, until they kill us in the name of God.According to research done at the University of Guelph, the microstructural properties of the beans are altered by the civets. Massimo Marcone, an assistant professor, was quoted in a 2004 report as saying: "During the night, the civet uses its eyesight and smell to seek out and eat only the ripest coffee cherries. The coffee cherry fruit is completely digested, but the beans are excreted."Which apparently makes for a good cup of joe."It's not very sharp," Apprentice Roast Master Munro told us. "It's not something you are going to taste and go, `Oh, that's bitter.' It's fairly smooth in that aspect. It has sort of what they call a chocolaty or caramelly taste. And it's fairly pungent. You know it hits your nose pretty quick."The question remains: What possessed mankind to ever invent such a thing? The atomic bomb, I can handle. And people who talk about "American Idol" and believe what they read on Wikipedia. But cat-poop coffee is a different beast."There are a number of different theories about who came up with the idea," Apprentice Roast Master Munro said. "My guess is, somebody probably discovered the coffee beans on the ground in a pile of civet waste, and they tried to figure out what it was. I don't know how exactly it came into fruition, but somehow it was developed."That's the thing. How long did they stand there, staring at civet dung, trying to figure it out, while hating America in so many countless ways? And who brought it to fruition? Will they ever get the credit? Not likely, I say.We asked Munro: Do your customers' eyes flutter up and down in ecstasy when they drink the special coffee?"Usually, yeah," he said. "It's a delicacy. And to make this affordable to the public, in the way we have done it, I mean, it's exciting. It's a big thing."It is a big thing, if you do the math. Somebody will make a fortune, and why shouldn't it be me? I didn't even make a dime on my own invention--Kass' Beer Can Chicken--and the Tribune gave the recipe away for free in my column. I'm still bitter to this day.So I called the Lincoln Park Zoo, hoping to persuade it to kick out some boring animals like tigers and lions and open The Civet Coffee House. About 450 civets would do it. We could require that every Chicago politician pick through the leavings with rubber gloves, to make up for all their graft, and submit to full-body searches so they won't steal any beans. I'd gladly accept 10 percent off the top as my consultant fee.Unfortunately, a spokesperson for the zoo said it had no civets, as yet, and if it does get some, it might go into the coffee business itself.At a Starbucks, a few patrons said they might try the special coffee, but what do you expect from people who spend four bucks a cup? At the Billy Goat Tavern, where I get my coffee, it costs 55 cents, and Spiros and Nonda, the grill men, were so appalled about Kopi Luwak that they cursed in Greek and made hand gestures mocking the foolishness of man."It's safe to consume," Munro said. "Plus, it is in the roaster for 15 minutes, at 400-something degrees, so any bacteria in there is pretty much destroyed. It's an 8-ounce cup."For $10.This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a bean." END
In 2007's The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, Kopi Luwak is the beverage of choice of Nicholson's character, who repeatedly praises it as the best cup of coffee in the world. In a climactic and humorous moment near the end of the film, Freeman's character finally reveals what he has always known regarding the source of the fine coffee, to the dismay of Nicholson's character. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak
(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 8/22, 9:10am)
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