CAT POOP COFFEE

One day we were drinking coffee at the home of a Korean friend when she informed us that the beverage we were consuming had been made from cat poop. Naturally, we thought she was joking; then we were horrified as she insisted it was true. It wasn’t until I got home and Googled “cat poop coffee” that I fully believed what she was saying.

Apparently, when the Dutch established coffee plantations on the islands of Java and Sumatra in the 1800s, they prohibited the native farmers from picking any of the coffee for their own use. To skirt the rule, the farmers collected feces from a long-tailed cat called a civet (Not what’s pictured above. That’s just a Burmese temple cat.), which ate the coffee fruits but left their seeds undigested. The natives then cleaned, roasted, and ground the “kopi luwak,” and voila: cat poop coffee became a trend.

Eventually the plantation owners themselves began to favor the rare civet coffee, and in a Tom Sawyer-esque turn of events, it became the most expensive coffee in the world. These days it costs around $35 to $80 per cup and is consumed mostly in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Although it’s plenty safe to consume (Trust me, I checked!), industry experts mostly concur that it’s a gimmick. I’d have to agree: it pretty much tasted like a stale cup of Folgers.