Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Poopacino, Anyone?

Dave Barry wrote about the craze for weird kinds of coffee in his March 27 column. 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.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for printing that. I miss Dave Barry. He's taking an extended hiatus and his columns no longer appear in my Sunday magazine. Now I have to get all my yuks from the guests on "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation" and "This Week."

1:40 PM, March 30, 2005  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Beam me up Scotty. There's no intelligent life down here."

Sounds like a bunch of artsy snobs trying to prove to their equally dumb friends how elite and sophisicated they are. Can't you see the sellers holding their sides laughing in a back room. The Luwak weasel is probably rolling on the ground laughing. Its got enough sense to eat clean berries. I can't imagine what the people who gather it must be thinking. I don't want to think what these connoisseurs might spread on their crackers.

These people aren't weird. They are certifiably stupid. I guess somebody has to wear the Emperor's clothes.

Somebody needs to tell them to buy expensive coffee at $10.00 a pound, and give $290 to the tsunami victims.

12:39 PM, March 31, 2005  

Post a Comment

<< Home