* jlrogers wrote, On 5/16/2007 6:29 AM:
Kopi Luwak, made in neighboring Indonesia from coffee beans excreted by
native civet cats, is reputedly the world's rarest and most expensive
coffee, painstakingly extracted by hand from the animals' forest droppings.
....

Kopi Luwak certainly exists and can be purchased, usually for high
prices; I've heard $400+ a pound. Unfortunately, since very few
retailers actually collect and process the beans personally, there is
little guarantee of provenance.

Moreover, the coffee is not particularly good, certainly not compared
to the extremely high quality offerings available today. If you want
the world's best coffee, you can spend about $50 a pound for the
winner of one of the national Coffee of Excellence competitions. The
man who started these competitions is George Howell, who sold The
Coffee Connection to focus on creating ways of encouraging small
farmers to increase their quality.

I took a class with George a few weeks ago ("Coffee 101") where the
issue of Kopi Luwak came up. His comment was "Coffee from assholes,
for assholes."