"Jeff" wrote in message
. ..
* 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."

LOL! With tiny women's clutch purses and men's ties selling for upwards of
$2500 in trendy outlets, there is no limit to the opportunities to separate
money from fools.

Max