coffee heaven
The Nottingham correspondent, on a working trip to Lincoln (which seems to be on her patch), bought me a lovely present from Imperial Teas of Lincoln (http://www.imperialteas.co.uk/), this, as I don't drink tea, was a small wooden box containing cafetiere sized samples of twelve different coffees.So far I have had Tanzanian Kibo Chagga, Papuan Bird of Paradise, Guatemalan Black Bull, Sumatran Jumpa Jaya, and Santa Domingo Golden Mountain, I still have coffees from India, Mexico and Haiti to look forward to, as well as the more usual coffee growing countries like Peru, and Salvador.
I thought I 'd have a little spoach around on their website, and was amazed to see that they stock Sumatran Kopi Luwak, a coffee so outre and fundamentally silly that I have only encountered a few references to it. At £480.00/kg you would need to be buying something pretty special, and I guess this is it. The website is a little bit coy, but basically the beans are recovered from Lemur shit. The coffee bean in its nascent state being contained in a fleshy red outer covering, irresistable to the Lemur, the bean as we know it passes through the digestive system of said Lemur and the excrement is then collected by local coffee madmen (or women), presumably the bean is then washed and roasted in the normal way. It is worth reading their description for the sheer political adroitness with which they avoid committing to the actual details, whilst at the same time leaving the basic facts obvious. It reminds me of the Monty Python 'crunchy frog' chocolate; only the finest dew-fresh baby frog, lightly killed, dipped in finest milk chocolate and garnished with larks vomit (from memory so forgive me if I haven't quite got the details right, my copy of the LP had a big scratch just after 'spring surprise' and I've never quite got the rest of the sketch). By the way, if you cooked the frog, it just wouldn't be crunchy, would it? sorry...
The question that springs immediately to mind is why did anybody think it was a good idea to make coffee out of Lemur droppings? I still can't quite square that circle, on the other hand, I also have a vision of whomsoever the current leader of the tory party is (I'm not being clever, I can't remember his name), at a very smart party in Notting Hill, sharing an after dinner cup of boiled marsupial doo doo with his oh so smug cronies, and it makes me smile.
Should you wish to join the smuggerati, according to their website they have a pound of it, and you can buy a 30g sample pack (with instructions) for a mere £15.00, enough for a cafetiere by the way. Go on, be the first, amaze your friends, and if you do, let me know, and I'll pop round. Otherwise, they have coffees agogo, plenty there to endanger your health, I now have a reason to visit Lincoln, even though they do mail order.
posted by Lampy @ 7/23/2006 09:57:00 pm
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