World’s most expensive coffee at £50 a cup comes to British stores…and it’s made from cats’ droppings

It might not be to everyone’s taste - and that’s not just because at £50 a cup it’s the most expensive coffee in the world. The secret behind the special blend about to go on sale at an upmarket department store is that it is made from cats’ droppings. While such an ingredient might leave many spluttering into their cups, Peter Jones thinks it is on to a winner.

For the rest of April, it is serving espressos, Americanos and lattes made from the droppings in its in-store coffee shop in Sloane Square, central London.

And for those who want the ultimate talking point over the after-dinner mints, the coffee beans are also on sale at £50 for 100 grams.

The store, part of the John Lewis partnership, has bought 60 packets of the exclusive blend of Jamaican Blue Mountain and the Kupi Luwak bean. The bean is rare, with less than 450lb harvested each year. The beans are extracted from the droppings of the palm civet, a cross between a cat and a monkey which lives in Indonesia. The civets eat the soft coffee cherries, digest the fruit pulp and excrete the beans on the forest floor, because they cannot digest the beans.

Plantation workers then collect the beans, which are sold as Luwak coffee. The civets are said to pick the best and ripest coffee berries. It is also thought that their gastric juices may add to the flavour.

You can buy it here. I think I’ll stick to Starbucks.

AWB

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Food and Drink, Just Funny. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.