Weird Coffee News World’s Most Expensive Coffee

A few years back, the smash hit movie “The Bucket List” spilled the beans on the pop culture world, letting them in on a little known weird fact about one of their celebrated coffees, Kopi Luwak, a highly prized and extremely expensive coffee, which is made with beans that have been harvested from the poop of civets. The coffee consists of partially digested coffee cherries, which have been eaten and defecated by the Asian palm civet. Kopi Luwak is produced mainly on the Indonesian Islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Sulawesi and East Timor. It is also widely gathered in the forest or produced in farms on the islands of the Philippines.

Since then, variations of Kopi Luwak have popped up every few years as a fad coffee. About a decade ago, it was Elephant Dung Coffee that bent coffee aficionados into a mind-numbing state. Black Ivory Coffee from Thailand, made from coffee beans that had been eaten and “processed” by elephants,  held the title of most expensive coffee in the world. The regular price of the coffee was $1,300 per kilogram, and it sold at some luxury hotels for about $50 US per cup. Unlike Kopi Luwak, which has become somewhat controversial of late because of the inhumane treatment of many of the civets who produce the coffee, the Black Ivory Coffee Company is produced by rescued elephants living on an elephant refuge where they are treated very well. 

Hot Buttered Coffee

 It’s a trend that has recently swept across continents worldwide. Butter in your coffee isn’t exactly a new thing. It’s actually a popular addition to the coffee cups in some African and Southeast Asian countries. Over the past couple of years though, hot buttered coffee has enjoyed a new round of popularity as “Bulletproof Coffee,” which uses high octane coffee beans and unsalted, grass-fed butter, developed and marketed by Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive, who swears by its health benefits. As far as flavor goes, some pretty-well respected names in the specialty coffee industry aren’t terribly impressed.

UC Davis to Offer Major in Coffee

Last year, the University of California Davis campus offered a class in engineering that focused on building a coffee brewer to turn out excellent coffee every time. This year, the university will be partnering with players in the specialty coffee industry to research just about every aspect of coffee. Once the Coffee Center at UC Davis acquires funding, the university hopes to offer a B.S. Major in Coffee Science.