Bandar Lampung, Indonesia — TO connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping.
Human hands don't harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They're plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses that love their coffee fresh.
They move at night, creeping along the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees, sniffing out sweet red coffee cherries and selecting only the tastiest. After chewing off the fruity exterior, they swallow the hard innards.
In the animals' stomachs, enzymes in the gastric juices massage the beans, smoothing off the harsh edges that make coffee bitter and produce caffeine jitters. Humans then separate the greenish-brown beans from the rest of the dung, and once a thin outer layer is removed, they are ready for roasting. The result is a delicacy with a markup so steep it would make a drug dealer weep.
It's called kopi luwak, from the Indonesian words for coffee and civet, and by the time it reaches the shelves of swish foreign food emporiums, devotees fork out as much as $600 for a pound -- if they can even find that much. The British royal family is said to enjoy sipping it. A single cup can sell for $30 at a five-star hotel in Hong Kong.
To anyone satisfied by a regular cup of joe with the morning newspaper, it might sound like a lot of hokum. Canadian food scientist Massimo Marcone thought kopi luwak was just an urban legend. Then he did some lab work.
He found that a civet's digestive system does indeed remove some of the caffeine, which explains why a cup of kopi luwak doesn't have the kick that other strong coffees do. The civet's enzymes also reduce proteins that make coffee bitter.
Marcone is one of the world's leading experts on foods that make most people go yuck! He recently wrote a book on the subject. One thing that really gets his glands salivating is casu frazigu cheese, which is packed with so many live maggots that it's not only disgusting, the Italian government outlawed it.
"The rotten cheese has millions of live maggots in it, and it's very highly prized all through Italy," Marcone said. "It sells under the counter for about $100 a pound. As you're carrying your bag with the cheese in it, you can actually hear the maggots hitting the side of the bag.
"People eat the cheese and maggots altogether. There's nothing in there that can cause harm."
