Civet Cat Poop Coffee

     A friend of mine returned from a trip to Indonesia and because he knows that I love coffee, and they have coffee plantation tours and things like that, he brought me two small boxes of specialty coffee, one was a couple ounces of pure robusto, grown on the plantation he toured, and the other was a single ounce of Wild Kopi Luwak, civet cat poop coffee. Civet cats are similar to cats and live in the wild where they eat coffee bean fruit and then locals have been collecting their poop and separating the beans out for centuries. It typically costs $20 - $30 per ounce online and everyone gives it rave reviews, but I just don't know.

     I do love coffee, I love coffee so much that I used to roast my own green coffee beans from Sweet Maria's, and prefer dry processed Ethiopian coffee that has been roasted to between full City Plus and Vienna, or about ⅓ of the way through the second crack just as it starts to get rolling. For me, that is the perfect roast for all kinds of coffee, producing a rich chestnut brown color, and a large expanded bean that's easy to hand grind, but first it has to rest for 3 to 4 days, after which little droplets of glistening oil appear on the surface, and the smell is heavenly. This is the peak time after roasting for all coffee, and it is excellent for about three to four more days, then it starts to lose quality.

     I no longer roast my own coffee because the home coffee roasters cost over $200 and last less than a year before the heaters fail to heat enough, you can always just use $20 to $30 air poppers that you might already have in storage, but they generally only roast enough for a single cup of coffee. Good green coffee beans are not expensive, say between $7 to $10 a pound plus shipping, way cheaper than buying quality roasted beans, but the heaters on the home roasters just don't last long enough.

     So in addition to civet cat poop coffee there is also Black Ivory elephant dung coffee, where elephants eat the fruit and then they collect the coffee beans from the dung, and while I may have had a vague interest in trying either Black Ivory or Kopi Luwak I certainly never bought any, and now that I own some I'm actually scared to try it, and slightly disgusted. Indonesia is a land where people think that durian tastes good, and I've had durian, it smells like rotten eggs and everybody's like, "no, you got to try it though, cuz it's so sweet and delicious," so you try it and it just tastes like sweet rotten eggs, so I'm afraid that the civet cat poop coffee will be similar to durian, like, "Oh no, you just have to get past the smell…"

     The other package he brought was a couple ounces of robusto grown on the plantation he toured. Robusto is distinguished from arabica as being from West Africa while arabica is from East Africa, robusto has twice the caffeine, is considered far more bitter, but has better oils for producing crema so is blended into espresso shots in Europe, where typically around 30% of an espresso shot is robusto and 70% is arabica. In general you cannot buy robusto in the United States, it was occasionally available from Sweet Maria's, but it is not used in any coffee or espresso drinks in the United States in general, or at least hasn't been for around 50 years.

     Apparently all of that coffee that people had in percolators on the stove more than 50 years ago was robusto, again twice as bitter, and then the process of percolation is too hot and exposes the grounds for too long making the coffee even more bitter, which is why everybody had to add cream and sugar to coffee prepared in percolators more than 50 years ago. But for the last 50 years we've had drip coffee with Mr Coffee makers and it seems 100% arabica beans in the United States, even in our espresso shots at places like Starbucks, Pete's, or Tim Hortons.

     I currently buy Nespresso compatible pods called Bestpresso that are made in Spain, most of which have some robusto which is typical for European espresso, so I have tasted robusto blended into espresso pods but have never tried it straight. I ended up trying the robusto, which turned out to be an instant coffee with a few grounds in it. It had a cereal grain flavor similar to Pero, the European grain and chicory beverage. It wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't my cup of tea, so to speak. But I am still not sure about that civet cat poop coffee, I may just keep it around to show people.