Weasel poop coffee is apparently a thing
I’ve heard of this stuff before, but it never appealed to me. This coffee is supposed to be excellent. But I’ll never know. Apparently, if you feed coffee cherries to a certain type of weasel, it will poop out the seed (which is what we call a coffee “bean”). The procedure is to roast and grind up the pooped-out coffee beans (I’d like to believe that they scrape off the weasel poop first, but I’m making no assumptions).
No thanks.
According to a Wikipedia page, this stuff is 5 time more expensive than un-pooped coffee.
Whatever.
I did a little research, and discovered that Vietnam has many farms where they feed caged weasels coffee cherries, collect the poop, and sell it.
Oh, great.
As you can imagine, there are also some animal welfare concerns. There are accusations about force-feeding weasels. The web page of one company that sells weasel poop coffee (http://www.huongmaicafe.com/blogs/vietnam-weasel-coffee/) seems defensive, almost aggressively defensive. Here’s a quote from the site:
“This is not cruel, this is so so so not cruel, don’t judging 3rd world countries like a savage and uncivilized tribe, or I will have to call you Jon Snow. “
I try to avoid the whole Jon Snow comparison altogether and just not drink the stuff. Today at the grocery store, though, I saw it for sale:
Weasel poop coffee! Get your weasel poop coffee here!
The price of the stuff is nowhere near 5x the price of poopless coffee, which makes me suspect that this is not the real stuff. Or real “shit.” I can say that, right, since that’s what we’re talking about?
You can even get a fancy gift box! Also, I love the Vietnamese flag planted in the middle of the cup of coffee.
There is enough variety of coffee here in Vietnam. I don’t need to try coffee that is made up of ground-up poop. I’ll avoid it, regardless of the exhortation of the weasel-poop website:
“Why don’t you just simply enjoy your cup of Weasel coffee?”
I think I’ll stick to regular coffee. Thanks, but no thanks.