-^-for posterity-^-

“oh, my! i never though weasels would do that!” it’s called chồn and it’s a type of coffee. if you get the authentic kind it costs 600$ (american) per pound and originates from indonesia. i never knew that weasels would eat coffee beans but they must.

i guess this is how it originated: one day, on the pretty island of indonesia, some weasel must have eaten a coffee bean. do they even have weasels in that country? i guess so. anyway, a weasel ate a coffee bean and they must not have chewed properly. a better description would be to say that it swallowed a coffee bean whole. i guess, because the weasel is pretty small (i guess, i’m no weaselologist) and the coffee bean is, well, pretty tough, they couldn’t digest it. it just passed right along and plopped right there on the ground. some enterprising indonesian must have been living in the same area as this weasel. s/he must have seen the weasel poop on the sidewalk, or dirt path or whatever and must have gone looking through it. who would look through weasel poop. i guess with a stick or something. hopefully not their finger. like i said, i’m not a weaselologist so weasel poop might be just small turds and the bean could just have landed on the ground. now this indonesian had an idea: what if i have the weasel eat more beans and then grind them all up into some super weasel poop coffee. s/he did it and, well, i guess it just took off.

now you can have weasel poop coffee, or better known as chồn, whenever you really want to at these special cafes. the stuff we were drinking was not authentic. it was some special chemical synthesis. evidently some scientist took enough time to copy the weasel’s digestive tract, enough so that there is no real distinction between the two. i wonder what that machine looks like.

600 bucks a pound! that’s even a little steep for starbucks! so, what does it taste like? well, it comes served as any other vietnamese coffee would: in a little tin container with grounds and hot water in it poised over an empty glass. we had ours over ice because that’s just how you drink stuff here in the south. i stirred it and stirred in only able to think about the origin of this process. weasels. i had a hard time picturing one but could easily picture the closest thing to a weasel that i knew: my brother. it was a disturbing image. the coffee tasted strong but not bitter. it left a thin layer of something in your mouth that was not terribly unpleasant. like very malleable wax. it sure wouldn’t have been worth 600$ a pound though.

i can see where the high price comes from. you would have to teach weasels how to eat lots of these beans (not chewing them mind you), you would pay someone to gather the brown gold, there would be some machine to cleanse the beans (hopefully huge, powerful and very sanitary) and you would have to pay someone to taste the coffee to make sure it was, well, clean. if anyone is interested in me sending them any chồn (not the real stuff, the fake stuff) i could find out how much it costs. just email me.

this also makes me wonder what else we’ve been missing out on all this time. there should be a special research and development team that feeds animals different foods and sees how their digestive systems alter the flavor. maybe, well, almonds would taste incredible after passing through the intestine of a golden retriever. perhaps gum-drops would have an extra punch after passing through a zebra. or what if gummy-bears were bestowed with healing powers after passing through domesticated cats. it’s all about the proper combination. we are missing out on this digestive gold mine.

i don’t know how much chồn i’ll drink while i’m over here. one glass may suffice.