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Coffee 'tastes better as s**t'
A Canadian scientist claims to have proven that the world's most expensive coffee really does taste better because the beans it is produced from have been eaten and defecated by a wild cat.
The Montreal Gazette says Massimo Marcone used taste machines and humans to establish that there really is a difference in taste between Kopi Luwak beans that have and have not passed through a civet cat's digestive system.
With all due respect, what is the scientific method here? My understanding, of many years, is that the defecated bean is of high quality because the cat only picks the ripest cherries. The cat preselects the best tasting coffees. The Kopi Luwak coffee cat is a gourmand.
So unless the experimenters also picked equally ripe coffee cherries from the same coffee bushes and gave them a "wet" process we are comparing apples to coffee. And this is an invalid reading of the results.
Of course drinking Kopi Luwak gives you big-time bragging rights.
The Ethiopian beans, which sell for more than 250 dollars per pound, are craved by coffee fanatics around the world who will often pay over 20 pounds for a cup of the coffee they produce.
"You're looking for a cappuccino. You could get a crappuccino," the University of Guelph professor said.
Marcone travelled to Ethiopia to track down the beans where they are found in single lines of faeces in the wild.
He says they taste better because digestion breaks down protein, and protein makes the non-digested beans bitter.
He insists there is no health risk in drinking coffee from the digested beans, as there is very little bacteria left on the beans once they are washed, and roasting destroys the rest.
His findings will be published in the Food Research International Journal in September.
A Canadian scientist claims to have proven that the world's most expensive coffee really does taste better because the beans it is produced from have been eaten and defecated by a wild cat.
The Montreal Gazette says Massimo Marcone used taste machines and humans to establish that there really is a difference in taste between Kopi Luwak beans that have and have not passed through a civet cat's digestive system.
With all due respect, what is the scientific method here? My understanding, of many years, is that the defecated bean is of high quality because the cat only picks the ripest cherries. The cat preselects the best tasting coffees. The Kopi Luwak coffee cat is a gourmand.
So unless the experimenters also picked equally ripe coffee cherries from the same coffee bushes and gave them a "wet" process we are comparing apples to coffee. And this is an invalid reading of the results.
Of course drinking Kopi Luwak gives you big-time bragging rights.
The Ethiopian beans, which sell for more than 250 dollars per pound, are craved by coffee fanatics around the world who will often pay over 20 pounds for a cup of the coffee they produce.
"You're looking for a cappuccino. You could get a crappuccino," the University of Guelph professor said.
Marcone travelled to Ethiopia to track down the beans where they are found in single lines of faeces in the wild.
He says they taste better because digestion breaks down protein, and protein makes the non-digested beans bitter.
He insists there is no health risk in drinking coffee from the digested beans, as there is very little bacteria left on the beans once they are washed, and roasting destroys the rest.
His findings will be published in the Food Research International Journal in September.
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