Opinion Forum

Poopacino, Anyone?

December 8th, 2008

Dave Barry once wrote about the craze for weird kinds of coffee. Here’s the good part:

This specialty-coffee craze has gone too far. I say this in light of a letter I got recently from alert reader Bo Bishop. He sent me an invitation he received from a local company to a ”private tasting of the highly prized Luwak coffee,” which ”at $300 a pound . . . is one of the most expensive drinks in the world.” The invitation states that this coffee is named for the luwak, a ”member of the weasel family” that lives on the Island of Java and eats coffee berries; as the berries pass through the luwak, a ”natural fermentation” takes place, and the berry seeds — the coffee beans — come out of the luwak intact. The beans are then gathered, washed, roasted and sold to coffee connoisseurs.

The invitation states: ”We wish to pass along this once in a lifetime opportunity to taste such a rarity.”

Or, as Bo Bishop put it: ”They’re selling processed weasel doodoo for $300 a pound.”

I first thought this was a clever hoax designed to ridicule the coffee craze. Tragically, it is not. There really is a Luwak coffee. I know because I bought some from a specialty-coffee company in Atlanta. I paid $37.50 for two ounces of beans. I was expecting the beans to look exotic, considering where they’d been, but they looked like regular coffee beans. In fact, for a moment I was afraid that they were just regular beans, and that I was being ripped off.

Then I thought: What kind of world is this when you worry that people might be ripping you off by selling you coffee that was NOT pooped out by a weasel?

So anyway, I ground the beans up and brewed the coffee and drank some. You know how sometimes, when you’re really skeptical about something, but then you finally try it, you discover that it’s really good, way better than you would have thought possible? This is not the case with Luwak coffee. Luwak coffee, in my opinion, tastes like somebody washed a dead cat in it.

But I predict it’s going to be popular anyway, because it’s expensive. One of these days, the people in front of me at the airport coffee place are going to be ordering decaf poopacino. I’m thinking of switching to heroin.

Yuck.

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Humor, press
Categories: Humor | Comments (2) | Home

2 Responses to “Poopacino, Anyone?”

doris | December 9th, 2008 at 6:57 am

I saw Andrew Zimmer on Bizaar Foods,a tv show ,taste that poop coffee,he said it was great,but he eats roaches,leeches,spiders,rats and 100 year old eggs,plus any and all forms of testicles,so,what does he know? I don’t think I’ll try it, all coffee tastes about the same to me,just weaker or stronger,so I will stick to cheap Maxwell House.Save my 350 for diesel taxes.

tabbi | December 11th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

Oh my God..you mean there are really people in this world that have nothing better to do with their money than buy recycled coffee beans from the arse of a weasel and then sit around and drink it????? Sheesh..I am hanging with the wrong crowd….Nah..No thanks, I think I will pass on the Weaselpoopachino..EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW