Strange Drink

It was a Friday morning a couple of weeks ago people are arriving at work, logging in to their computers etc and some how the gist turns to urban legends and my colleague describes a very strange coffee bean preparation process involving the digestive tract of a monkey! What!? All it took was two words in Google (Monkey Coffee) and urban legend became fact with some modification, the monkey is actually a palm civet. I am so behind times on this one, among the links that came up on Google was one to an article saying Oprah had hosted a tasting of this very esoteric coffee like 3 years ago. After much discussion and involuntary shudders, my boss whips out his credit card and declares that a tasting is in order and this purchase qualifies as a company expense. I believe all things should be tried once and only once, so I am definitely game for a tasting. Some things should be tried several times in different positions but I digress. Like joke like joke my pipo order a sample from a company online somewhere in Asia. We soon ease into the days work (the credit card does have to be paid off at the end of the month) and by end of day I had promptly forgotten all about Kopi Luwak. Then it arrived yesterday vacuum sealed straight from Indonesia. It was not a small ceremony this morning o, brewing the coffee. Finally it was time to taste it. I must say I was disappointed. I do like coffee, I cannot claim to be an aficionado or anything but the aroma of this particular coffee was like practically non existent (I had to stick my nose in the cup to catch a whiff of it) and it tasted like ... Nescafe! Could this be a case of too many cooks (in this case 4) spoiling the broth? Abi na 'normal' (but very high priced) coffee beans wey we buy? Who knows. We still have some beans left over and we have decided to reconvene on Monday for another tasting, lets see if I will have a different opinion then.

Photo Courtesy of animalcoffee.com