#elephantpoo

Playing With Elephant Poo

Would you pay $70 for one cup of coffee? Would you pay $70 for beans picked out of Elephant Dung that makes the world’s most expensive java?

The world’s most expensive coffee, priced at $70 per serving, is made from elephant poo. Black Ivory Coffee, produced in Thailand’s Golden Triangle, a region better known for its export of opium, is made by having elephants eat the coffee beans, which are mixed into a fruit mash. Over the course of three days the coffee beans pass through the elephants’ digestive system; they are then picked out of its dung before being washed, dried and roasted. According to founder Blake Dinkin a 44-year-old entrepreneur from Canada, 33lbs of coffee beans make just 1lbs of coffee.

So what makes elephant poo coffee so special? “Elephants eat a lot of grass and a lot of green, leafy matter,” Mr Dinkin told NPR.

“A herbivore, to break that down, utilizes fermentation to break down that cellulose. Fermentation is great for things like wine or beer or coffee, because it brings out the sugar in the bean, and it helps impart the fruit from the coffee pulp into the bean.”

Fermentation helps to remove the bitterness of coffee, according to Mr Dinkin, who explained that no sugar is needed to sweeten his brew.

“I want people to taste the bean, not just the roast,” he said. “The aroma is floral and chocolate; the taste is chocolate malt with a bit of cherry; there’s no bitterness; and it’s very soft, like tea. So it’s kind of like a cross between coffee and tea.”

Mr Dinkin sources Arabica beans from hill tribes in the north of Thailand near the border with Myanmar, which adds to the coffee’s nutty flavour.

NPR asked several guests at the Anantara Golden Triangle hotel to try a serving-five or six espresso cups worth, and the response was unanimous.

“It’s sort of fruity,” one woman said. “It’s raisin-y to me. I normally describe drinking coffee as a bit like dinking puddle water. But it hasn’t got that horrible muddy water flavour afterwards, which is really nice. I really like it.”

A male guest said it had a ‘gentle taste’. “Usually I use sugar with coffee. But…yeah, I quite like that,” he said.

Black Ivory Coffee, which donates eight per cent of its sales towards the care of street rescued elephants at the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, is currently only available at five-star hotels and resorts in Asia and the Middle East.

But it has recently come to America by way of a store in Comfort, Texas, called The Elephant Story, where the profits go to elephant conservation.

However, coffee made from an animals faeces is actually nothing new. A coffee shop in the UK serves coffee made from cat poo-for £9 a cup.

The brand, Kopi Luwak, is made from the beans of coffee berries which have been eaten by an Asian Toddy cat and passed through its digestive tract.

And then there is Camocim Organic Jacu Bird Coffee, which is made from the droppings of Brazil’s native Jacu bird.