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Cat Poop Coffe

delicacy from Jakarta

Posted by Jeena

One of my fiancé's coworkers brought a rare gift from abroad: Kopi Luwak

It's a coffee that consists of partially digested coffee cherries, which have been eaten and defecated by the Asian palm civet, which kind of looks like a cat:

Palm Civet
CC BY-SA 2.0 Bernard Dupont from France

It's one of the most expensive coffee in the world, and a rare variety of coffee. So we were really eager to taste it.

I prepared everything, and because it's such a rarity, I didn't want to just use the coffee machine, but instead my Italian Bialetti Moka Express.

Colorful coffee mug, Bialetti Moka Express, Kopi Luwak

I learned from James Hoffmann how to use it in the best way, and you should too:

I filled up the basket.

Full basket of ground coffee

I put it on the gas and waited until the water boiled by avoiding the bubbling phase.

Burning gas under the moka express Coffee starting to come out at top of the moka express Full moka express

Then I put it into my colorful coffee mug.

Pouring coffee into the mug

But now you wonder how amazingly it tasted. Here are my notes I took while drinking:

All in all, extremely underwhelming. On top of that it doesn't have a roast or any other date anywhere on the package, so it might just have been very old.

Bag of Kopi Luwak

But it had a cool zipper like mechanism to close it once you opened it and used some.

Zip mechanism at the back of the bag

[update:] Someone mentioed that James Hoffmann has a interesting video about the history and background of Kopi Luwak, and he's description is pretty similar to mine: James Hoffmann - Kopi Luwak/Civet Poop Coffee: Disgusting or Delightful?

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