|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Amar Chandel introduces us to Kopi Luwak, the world’s most expensive coffee IF you are a coffee lover, you might be sourcing your brew from Brazil, Hawaii, Ethiopia or Jamaica. But if you are a true connoisseur — and have deep enough pockets — then you may patronise Kopi Luwak from Indonesia to have the privilege of saying that you drink the world’s best and costliest coffee.
It retails for about $1500 a kg (nearly Rs 70,000) and a single cup can set you back by about $60 (Rs 2,800). Mind you, we are not talking about prices in five-star hotels, which may charge much more, but in ordinary coffeehouses. A store in London’s Sloane Square sells a blend of Kopi Luwak peanut and Blue Mountain called Caffe Raro for £50 (Rs 4,500) a cup. True gourmets swear by its exceptional aroma, lack of bitterness and "high notes". This brand of coffee is so rare that every year barely 450 kg of it comes into the world market and whatever does come in is quickly lapped up by the US and Japan. The process by which it is made is so time-consuming and unusual that the high cost is more than justified, say the manufacturers. However, before you take it in your mind to savour at least one cup of this brew, cost be damned, please familiarise yourself with the manufacturing procedure. This coffee is made from red coffee beans, which grow mostly on the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali and Sulawesi in the Indonesian archipelago, in the Philippines and East Timor. These are fed to a cat-like animal called common Asian palm civet (paradoxurus hermaphroditus), also known as Toddy Cat. They have the tendency to pick up only the richest, ripest and sweetest fruit. Once the beans go into the stomach of the dark brown, tree-dwelling creature, the civet’s endogenous digestive secretions start working on them and digest the soft fleshy outer layer. This internal digestion removes the bitterness by breaking down the proteins that give coffee this undesirable taste. Instead, it adds a special, unusual flavour to the beans, the hard inner seeds of which are expelled by the civets as excreta. This waste material is rigorously washed and the berries separated from the rest of the feces. These are cleaned, dried in the sun and then lightly roasted at high temperature to let out the aroma. It is said to taste like musty caramel and chocolate with a complex symphony of flavours. Generally, a cup of coffee is made by adding 8 grams of original roasted Kopi Luwak powder into 150cc of hot water. Boiling the water is avoided since it could degrade the aroma and taste. Manufacturers insist that there is no danger of any contamination at all because the civet is not a carrier of E. coli or any other bacteria which can be potentially dangerous to humans. Since there is no record of any illness caused by civet coffee, it is believed to be perfectly safe and sanitary. A similar coffee is Kopi Muncak (or Muntjak) which is produced from the feces of several species of barking deer, or Muntjak, found throughout South-East Asia. While civet coffee is commonly produced from captive animals, this one is made from the droppings of wild animals, mostly in Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago. Well, you may consider
it a case of a disappointed fox calling the grapes sour but I have no
stomach for something that has been cat or deer poop. That I do not
have that kind of money to burn on coffee is another matter. But if
you have the courage and the filthy money for the bizarre brew, best
of luck.
|
|||
|
|
|||
