Money
Making money
The most expensive coffee in the world
If your investments have done well, or you have saved a little money and are no longer having to count every penny you spend, there are one or two little treats you can allow yourself, writes Julian Champkin
For example, you can reward yourself with a decent cup of coffee. Real coffee. You don’t have to put up with instant any more - nor, indeed, with run-of-the-coffee-mill beans.
Just as a wine specialist will provide you with wine from a named chateau, specialists such as the Monmouth Coffee Company of Soho will provide the best coffee beans, from individually named estates in South America, Asia or Africa.
They will roast it to your specification, grind it to your preference, and hand-deliver it fresh to your door. You can get a very good one for around £10 for 250 grammes, enough for 30 brews if you are careful.
Compared to instant it is a bit like upgrading to first class in an aircraft: it might cost several times the money, but then it is a quite different experience.
But still you have not really pushed the boat out. You have not yet begun to experience the full delight of the rarest and most expensive cup of coffee in the world. For that you would expect personal attention to your bean. You would expect each berry on the bush to have been individually selected for you, at just the peak moment of ripeness, then carefully and tenderly hand-picked by expert harvesters. You would be wrong.
In fact the rarest and most expensive coffee in the word is called Kopi Luwak. It grows on the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi - formerly Celebes - in the Indian Ocean, and it is made from beans which are not picked by hand at all. They are actually plucked from the bush by a species of wild civet-cat.
The Asian Palm Civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus if you want its Latin name, is called the Luwak by the locals. It emerges each night from the surrounding forest, seeks out the most succulent, the reddest, the ripest of the berries in the coffee plantation - and swallows them whole. I think you may be beginning to guess the rest.
It is seeking, of course, the flesh which surrounds the inner bean. The bean itself passes undigested through the animal, and is excreted. Javanese natives search the forest floor for the dung and wash the coffee beans out of it. The digestive juices of the animal are said to remove the bitterness and to add a subtle and unsurpassed flavour of their own.
The beans are lightly roasted only, so as not to impair that flavour. Very little is harvested - just 250 kilos of the genuine wild-collected article a year, it is said, though fake versions are also on the market. (It is a strange world when fraudsters actually want to pretend that their coffee has been through an animal's intestines before it reaches your lips, but still.) Most Kopi Luwak is exported to Japan and America, where it sells for up to 600 dollars per pound. £50 has been charged for a single cup. It has occasionally been seen in Britain.
So now you know. If you have the money - and the inclination - you can drink the coffee that the cat brought in.
