With some global coffee consumers willing to pay seemingly anything for whatever has the billing “world’s most expensive coffee,” producers in Peru are mimicking Indonesia’s kopi luwak producers.
Farmers there recently told Reuters that coffee harvested from the dung of coati — a wild, raccoon-like South American mammal — yields similar results to the notoriously smooth coffee harvested from the dunk of kopi luwak, Indonesian palm civets.
Jose Jorge Durand, owner of Peru’s Chanchamayo Highland Coffee collective, said that 60 coati were involved in the production of 990 pounds of coffee this year, the company’s first producing dung coffee. He told Reuters that it has been exported for approximately $36 per pound to the United States, where the coffee is retailing for as much as $270 per pound.
“With this financial crisis, the rich have become richer and don’t know how to spend their money, so this is one option,” Durand told Reuters.
Kopi luwak has faced criticism recently amid allegations of animal abuse, but Durand told the news service that his coati are free range and only occasionally corralled for collections of droppings.
Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
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“With this financial crisis, the rich have become richer and don’t know how to spend their money, so this is one option,” Durand told Reuters.
Why not raise funds at the Humane Society with caged stray cats? Locally made cat shit coffee could be the new rage and support a good cause!
Why does ANYONE in the coffee industry continue to give this (literally) shitty coffee promotion? FFS there’s farmers all over the world trying to improve the quality of their output through genuine agricultural and processing improvements. THAT should be generating better results in the cup AND increasing value for their products. THAT is what is worth talking about. Not idiots picking partially digested green beans out of catshit.
Yes. This makes me cranky.
I agree completely. Everyone talks about sustainability, but it seems that the focus is on bells and whistles. Farmers need real support from true partners who are willing to make changes to a supply chain that is based on colonization and exploitation of small farmers. These gimmicks will not create long-term success for anyone.
Better yet, just buy the coffee made by Coffee Primero. It is made using a process developed at the University of Florida that mimics how the Palm Civet produces Kopi Luwak, but without the involvement of any animals. With Coffee Primero’s Magic Cat coffee, you not only get the awsome smoothness of real Kopi Luwak, you get a huge reduction of acrylamides (As compared to ordinary coffee. Acrylamides are known to the state of California, the country of Italy and others, to be cancer causing agents in all coffee. Those of you who live in California are now seeing the 18″x18″ warning signs in coffee retail locations, I’m sure.), and you get a price comparable to other good coffees, and no animals are used.
Sure, they are caged occasionally, only once a year, during harvest time, FOR 4 MONTHS! I live in this area, and there are not enough coatis so 100% free range is not an option. When they first discovered Kopi Luwak in Indonesia, the cats ate the cherries because they wanted to. Now these animals are forced to eat the cherries. We get mad when chickens are kept in very small cages, but do not mind sticking wild animals in cages for a couple of months a year to force feed them coffee cherries because we want kopi luwak or café coati? So because there are some bored millionaires, these producers are allowed to torture animals?
Hmmm…I don’t think we’ll be serving any kind of “dung” coffee. Maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t think it’s necessary.