The straight poop

I’m not real adventurous, especially when it comes to food. Let others gulp down duck embryos marinated in their own juices; I’ll stick to scrambled eggs.

But for a long time, I’ve been intrigued by a local product: Coffee Alamid, otherwise known as "civet-poop coffee." This is the coffee bean that is recovered whole from the droppings of a large cat known as a Palm Civet. The civets roam around the Philippine forests, eating sweet coffee berries from trees at their leisure. They are then stalked by entrepreneurial farmers, who patiently wait for the cats to unload, then gather up the digested beans for the retail market. The beans apparently ferment inside the civet’s digestive tract for some time before being excreted whole.

One creature’s poop is, indeed, another man’s gold, for Coffee Alamid is marketed as "the rarest coffee in the world." You can get some at Bag of Beans in Tagaytay for about P320 for a 50-gram bottle. This will last the average coffee drinker about two days, which is just fine, since civet-poop coffee is best consumed quickly. Wouldn’t want it to spoil, right?

Although civet-poop coffee has been covered in the media before, I’ve noticed that very few who report on it have actually tried the coffee; just the name alone – and the coffee’s origins – is supposed to be the story.

Anyway, even though there are many foods on this earth I would not try, coffee is something I rarely pass up. So, on the theory that it’s probably safer than swimming with a stingray, I set aside the colorful details of Coffee Alamid, obtained a small jar (from a helpful friend and coworker) and set about grinding some beans. First thing you notice is, the coffee beans have a sweet, almost heady aroma. There’s an undertone of earthiness in the smell, somewhat akin to Barako coffee.

There’s none of the lightness, the winy-ness of Indonesian roasts, though that country has its own version – Kopi Luwak, which is Indonesian for "Palm Civet coffee."

The Philippine website arengga.com notes that Coffee Alamid is "a natural blend of the Philippines’ finest Liberica, Exelsa, Robusta and Arabica beans. The nocturnal civets freely roam the forests in the wild. The beans are all collected in the wild." The site adds that its "fine and smooth taste" is "a winning formula during high-power meetings."

I’m not sure how they tested that claim. Presumably they gave a blindfold test to some busy executives, and then only later revealed that their perkiness was due to drinking civet poop. Hey, at P6,500 per kilogram, it could become the new cocaine.

Ground up, the beans behave just like regular coffee, which you then place in a French press or a drip coffeemaker.

And how does it taste? Delicious. Richer than many Asian roasts, I tried the civet-poop coffee in two ways: black, and with my usual cream and sugar. Black, you notice that Coffee Alamid is bolder, but with the aforementioned earthiness which may come from the organic harvesting methods (again, farmers trooping around with little civet-poop bags picking up the beans and washing them off). With cream and sugar, it becomes even more remote from its original exotic provenance: it could easily pass for a cup from any café in town. So, to be fair, it smells better than it tastes, but it’s best tasted straight. The straight poop, as it were.

There are all kinds of questions that arise when drinking Coffee Alamid.

What about SARS or toxoplasmosis? The research indicates that there is little to worry about when drinking civet-poop coffee. In fact, the evidence suggests that the coffee beans, after being fermented in the civet’s digestive system and excreted, contain fewer bacteria than they normally would. These are some clean-living cats we’re talking about, apparently.

Wikipedia adds that "the raw, red coffee berries are part of the civet’s normal diet, along with insects, small mammals, and other fruit. The inner bean of the berry is not digested, but it is believed that enzymes in the stomach of the civet add to the coffee’s flavor by breaking down the proteins that give coffee its bitter taste. The beans are excreted still covered in some inner layers of the cherry, and are sold to dealers. The beans are washed, and given only a light roast so as to not destroy the complex flavors which develop through the whole process."

The nice thing is that Coffee Alamid actually supports the protection of the civet, preserving its forest habitats, such as the clean streams and arengga pinnata sugar palm trees. The website goes on to say that Coffee Alamid "provides livelihood for the forest dwellers such as the coffee farmers and the revival of the Philippine coffee industry. Coffee Alamid is for nation building."

Well, nations have been built on stranger things than cat poop. Maybe environmental entrepreneurship is the wave of the future. I still can’t imagine what prompted the original farmers to try brewing the civet poop in the first place. Were they bored? Were their lives so bereft of exotic flavors? Or did they just notice that all their coffee beans were disappearing from the trees, and decided some payback was in order? I don’t know. But I plan to sit and ponder these questions over a fresh cup of Alamid brew. I hear it goes well with balut.