UMMM, ELEPHANT DUNG COFFEE

I just read in daily Coffee News from Roast magazine that an upscale resort company in Thailand, Anantara, is selling coffee harvested from the natural waste of elephants for upwards of $50 a cup.  NO, keep reading, as a coffee fiend you should know that.

The coffee supplants Kopi Luwak (palm civet) coffee as the world’s most expensive.  Anantara has produced approximately 50 kilograms of the coffee, with a retail price of approximately $1,100 per kilogram, at its resort locations in South Male, Baa Atolls and Thailand.  Anantara is calling the coffee, Thai-grown arabica beans hand-picked from the dung of elephants, Black Ivory.  Here’s what the company said in an announcement of the product:  

Research indicates that during digestion, the enzymes of the elephant break down coffee protein.  Since protein is one of the main factors responsible for bitterness in coffee, less protein means almost no bitterness.

The process begins with selecting the best Thai Arabica beans that have been picked from an altitude of 1,500 meters.  Once deposited by the elephant, the individual beans are handpicked by mahouts (elephant trainer and caregiver) and their wives and sundried.  Now there is a career in coffee that I hadn’t anticipated!

Of course, with such a labor-intensive production process, the company says it is naturally taking the utmost care in brewing, using a siphon method. It should be noted that the beans are being roasted to a full city.

In order to demonstrate freshness and to enhance diners’ senses, the coffee is ground by hand at the table and brewed using technology developed in 1840 in Austria.  This balancing siphon is not only a beautiful machine, but also widely recognized as the best way to brew coffee.  The consistent 93° Celsius temperature and contact time between water and bean result in a very clean and flavorful taste.  The four minute brewing process is visually enticing and leaves a lasting impression.  I’ll bet!

Please note:  The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company will not add Elephant Dung Coffee to our three brands of gourmet coffees.  You’ll just have to be content with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains, the one with no bitter aftertaste, no acidity and no elephants.  CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and without elephants.  And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees that will knock your socks off…without elephants even though you’ll probably find them in both Ethiopia and Indonesia!  We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society!  But we don’t shoot elephants.

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.

Look for the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company’s Cowboy Coffee Saloon in New Mexico at the Ruidoso Evening Lions Gun Show, November 3-4 and at the Ruidoso Christmas Jubilee, November 9-11 at the Ruidoso Convention Center.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when you chew on other people's fingernails!  So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!