Some of you might have been enjoying life up until now, but you really haven’t hit the peak of your existence until you’ve drunk coffee that’s worked its way through a weasel’s colon. Alas, I have not hit the peak of my existence, largely because I’ve never been daring enough to drink poop coffee. They call it Kopi Luwak, probably because that sounds a lot more sophisticated than Coffee Beans Extracted from Weasel Feces. Sometimes truth in advertising can be a liability.
Dave Barry already addressed this dietary wonder years ago, but I thought it was time to revive it for a new generation of people who will now think of poop while they’re drinking their morning coffee. I’m taking a different enough direction from Mr. Barry, although if he did sue me, I’d be so broke after my attorney’s fees that he’d only end up with some pocket lint and a DVD of The Beverly Hillbillies.
I know there’s a healthy level of skepticism about this product, and I assure you, it’s real. One can’t help but wonder how exactly someone discovered this particular culinary gem. A variety of scenarios come to mind, typically involving someone with the intellect of a damp dishrag and the social skills of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Being the dedicated blogger I am, I’ve dedicated hours of my life to imagining the scenario where this all developed. Some guy had to have been wandering around the wilderness with a bag of coffee beans. Due to some mishap, he spilled the beans all over the ground, and a weasel (conveniently nearby) scurried over and started gorging itself on these beans.
Then, this guy had to have had what I can only imagine was the strangest series of thoughts had by anyone ever with the possible exception of Mark Zuckerberg trying to figure out how to smile. This guy’s thought process went like this: “Hey, that weasel just ate my coffee beans! Well, I could always buy more coffee beans later; it’s not like they’re hard to find. But wait! What if I follow this weasel around for the next thirteen hours? What if the coffee beans make it all the way through his intestinal tract? Then the weasel will poop out my coffee beans. I’ll just dig through his weasel poop with a fork, maybe rinse the beans off later, then make coffee! Just when I thought there was no way I could prove my intelligence to the world…”
I don’t know how that first cup of coffee went, nor how the weasel must have felt seeing a strange bipedal creature digging through its poop like a squirrel digging for an acorn. If the weasel had rabies, it all could’ve ended right there I suppose. Then we’d all be missing out.
So, this guy was watching animals poop, and instead of disgusting, vile-smelling filth, he saw opportunity. Somehow, he made a connection between fecal matter and coffee, a logical leap that would land anyone else a job as a crash test dummy.
A larger question is whether or not this guy had tried other ideas before settling on the coffee bean poop. You don’t just jump right into the coffee bean poop thing without warming up to it first. He may have had a friend who tried poison ivy tea, but the results of that little experiment may have put him off (and formally kicking off the Darwin awards for that year).
It is possible he got the idea after reading Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a book that has the entertainment value of getting a colonoscopy with a rusty jackhammer. When I finished reading it, for a fleeting moment I believed that one could possibly market walrus-vomitted cantaloupes. Fortunately, I remembered that I was normal, and I set fire to the book. But I digress.
Another question is: why a weasel? Did he try this approach with other animals first? How many animals had to crap out coffee beans before this guy settled on weasels? The level of dedication needed to engage in this practice is not casual. This guy was probably caging up random animals and feeding them coffee beans, all the while reciting Walt Whitman poems in pig Latin. Regardless, I’d give a year’s salary to read whatever diarrheas diaries those animals would have written about the whole experience. Most of them probably would wonder how, out of all the species, this human creature ended up on top of the evolutionary pile instead of another sort of pile.
But the real hero in all of this is the person who marketed the idea. This guy (and again, it was definitely a guy) has the ultimate bragging rights in the marketing universe. He could be at a bar, and one guy could be saying, “You know, I’m the guy behind McDonald’s slogan. Because of me, McDonald’s has seen a two hundred million dollar revenue increase in the last two quarters.”
Then the poop coffee marketer would say, “I’ve literally convinced people to drink coffee that we pulled out of weasel poop. And people pay $250 a pound for it.”
To end with the poop pun everyone’s been waiting for, I’m sure that the weasel poop coffee is their number two best seller.
Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash
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With any luck, we will see it in a k- cup soon!
Somehow, I don’t think anyone will read the fine print if that happens. I do wonder what the tagline would be: “You won’t believe this s***!”