Malay civet

I accidentally bumped into an old man at Shoppers the other day. He was around 5-foot-4, balding and nice.

“Oh, sorry.”

“No, I like bumping into people,” he said.

“Oh, well, you know, OK yeah. Me too. If only everybody felt the same way. That’d be a good world.”

Pause.

“I’m deciding on a coffee. What should I get?”

He suggested a few things for me to buy, but none satisfied my palate. I kept saying “yes, that would be ok,” and then he would suggest three more. This went on for about 10 minutes going through the variety of roasts and flavors, and then he says, “Oh no, that’s cat poop coffee.”

Confused, I said, “What?” It’s an appropriate confused follow-up question.

He responded, “Yeah, they feed the coffee beans to cats. And they shit them out. And there’s your coffee.”

“Wait, do you mean, that my coffee is made of cat poop or that they just test these coffee beans on cats to see if they’re good beans or that this is just terrible coffee and comparable to cat poop?”

“Look it up.”

“I … uh … I’m just gonna get this one. Thanks, sir. Have a great day.”

I walked away from the coffee aisle with a bad taste in my mouth. All I could taste was cat s— when reminiscing on the coffee I drank earlier that morning. Does Dunkin’ Donuts have cats in the back constantly pooping out my brew? Is that why I poop after drinking it? Because I’m just pooping out the poop that was previously pooped?

I need to get to the bottom of this.

DUNG! DUNG! DUNG! There she, it, is. The excrement from the Asian palm civet, also known as the toddy cat, a weird-looking possum, lemur, cat-raccoon.

In Southeast Asia, “Kopi Luwak” is an expensive delicacy coffee made from the butt dribblets of the civet, that little guy up top. These “cats” as I’ll call them, are fed the coffee beans, and then those beans are digested, shat out, located in the poop and roasted.

There’s no doubt it’s an adorable creature, but even though my younger cousin is an adorable creature, I wouldn’t feed him coffee beans hoping to gain my morning beverage from his meadow muffins.

What threw me for a loop though was the impossibility of that grocery store coffee actually being civet coffee. Crazy old man. Civet coffee runs for hundreds of dollars per samples or ounces in Southeast Asia, and over half a thousand dollars for a pound of the stuff. What I bought was merely seven dollars, though it still tasted like shit so it very well could have been the cat’s.

And if you think you’d like to try it, why not also muster up the courage to down some Brazilian bird poop coffee or Thailand’s elephant dung coffee. I’m now only waiting for a deranged celebrity to get on the craze of eating the cherry-like coffee plant fruit and pooping it out for millions of dollars. Lady Gaga’s “Lady Java.” Angelina’s “Joe-lie.” And for those who hate caffeine: Zach Galifia-decaf-is.

And I just want to end with a “thank you,” to that old man in the grocery store. For destroying any fondness I had for Baby Ruths. I was blissfully unaware of their resemblance to the dried droppings until now.

Well, s—.

Who drinks this? Apparently these guys did: