I encourage you to try it first and then by all means pass judgement. The type of animal, diet, the brewing process, type of cherry and even the cleaning process all affect taste. In short, in the same way that you would not say that all coffee is the same please do not lump Black Ivory Coffee (with only one harvest location) with Kopi Luwak or any other coffee. This contributes to the added cost as well as the fact that I donate a percentage of my sales back to help rescued elephants at the foundation. It addition to broken or lost beans they also go through density sorting and hand sorting so that only the largest beans are used so that the roast is even. Marcone who is a Food Scientist with the University of Guelph who would be happy to back up my assertion as he is the scientist I worked with.įinally, it takes 33 kg to make 1 kg of Black Ivory Coffee. In the same way that grapes are placed into a vat to ferment to make wine (or whiskey, beer or chocolate) the coffee cherries ferment up to 70 hours in the stomach of the elephant. This means it uses fermentation to break down cellulose. The digestive system of an elephant is that of a herbivore. These added fruits will affect the taste. Each elephant has its own recipe because they should enjoy what they eat and gain nutritional advantage. The cherries are then mixed with fruit or other food that the elephant enjoys such as banana, rice, tamarind etc. It starts with 100% Arabica coffee cherries picked at an altitude of roughly 1500 meters. The taste of Black Ivory Coffee is distinctive. In addition the women from the elephant owning families can earn in 45 minutes what is a legal day’s wage in Thailand (US10-15/hour). Elephants eat coffee cherries naturally in the wild and at the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation where I produce Black Ivory Coffee, the elephants voluntarily snack on them should they wish. First, unlike civet coffee, Black Ivory Coffee helps not hurts animals. I would like to correct you on Black Ivory Coffee. You can spend $35 on a cup of poop coffee, or you can spend the same amount on a whole bag of meticulously cultivated geisha beans. It doesn’t improve the taste, there’s the potential to exploit and harm animals, and it artificially drives up the price without a corresponding increase in quality. The way we see it, there’s no reason to bring animals into the coffee process. Black Ivory coffee is harvested from elephant poop and while there’s not an exploitive trend as there is around kopi luwak, we still have to ask – but WHY?! There’s no significant scientific difference from coffee beans processed traditionally and those processed by an animal’s stomach. The thing is, the exclusivity of this coffee and its resulting super-high price point (sold for $35 per cup in some shops) has created an exploitive industry where hundreds of civet cats are kept in cages, fed low-quality coffee cherries, and for what? Kopi luwak has never rated as a specialty coffee, and is not widely respected among coffee professionals. Their stomach juices act as a way to process and ferment the coffee, and the animals basically function as a living coffee pulper. In the wild, civet cats tend to eat the ripest coffee cherries, meaning the beans that show up in their feces are the best of the crop. So let’s delve into this somewhat strange specialty coffee trend.Ĭivet cat coffee, called kopi luwak, is the partially digested coffee beans expelled by the Indonesian civet cat. You’ve probably heard about this stuff – and about its price. We get a lot of questions about civet cat coffee, so we’re explaining the trend of sourcing beans that are harvested from animal feces.
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