Asian coffee connoisseurs are taking a shine to a rare brew that Taiwanese farmers are producing with the help of monkeys, and you can bet something disgusting is about to follow.Formosan rock monkeys have long been a scourge to coffee farmers in Taiwan's mountains because they eat the ripe berries and spit out the seeds, but now, the farmers are collecting these half-chewed seeds and roasting them to produce coffee.
"The monkeys pick the reddest fruits to eat, and spit out the seeds. They cannot swallow them because that may cause indigestion," said Liao Ching-tung, a coffee farmer for 30 years who has recently taken up roasting the regurgitated seeds.
"For other crops it may cause serious loss, but if they eat coffee in this area, then it saves me the trouble of peeling the fruits," he added. So, rather than keep the monkeys off his crop or having to peel them, Captain Lazy Farms is happy to use a regurgitated blend.
Nasty.
Liao says the discarded seeds yield a sweeter coffee with a vanilla-like scent, and somehow it sells for about $56 a pound. Sure, all that chewing and monkey salival and bile actually give it a vanilla sweetness...how's about we taste a little non-monkey coffee and just be sure.
Off course, the more exotic the process, the more some people want to have it. For Wang Chih-ming, the higher price is not a deterrent. "It's got a nice aftertaste, that's really good," said
The biggest morons covet coffee beans excreted by native civet cats in Indonesia. Painstakingly extracted by hand from the animals' forest droppings, the coffee reputedly sells for around $450 a pound. Catshit brew? Can that be better than Monkeypurge blend?
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