There’s Exotic and There’s Stinkin Elephants

There’s Exotic and There’s Stinkin Elephants was Originally Posted on December 7, 2012 by lavarock

These was a joke I heard many years ago that went like this:

Two drunk friends spent all their time drinking. John told Bob that when he died, he wanted Bob to pour a bottle of beer on his grave. One day John did in fact die and Bob stood over the grave with a giant bottle of their favorite beer. “Here’s to you John, my friend. I brought the beer and on your grave it shall be. I just hope that you understand that I am going to filter it a bit through the old kidneys first!”

So with that joke in mind, I’m going to quote a small bit of an article I found today in USA Today.

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Thailand (AP) — In the lush hills of northern Thailand, a herd of 20 elephants is excreting some of the world’s most expensive coffee.

Trumpeted as earthy in flavor and smooth on the palate, the exotic new brew is made from beans eaten by Thai elephants and plucked a day later from their dung. A gut reaction inside the elephant creates what its founder calls the coffee’s unique taste.

Stomach turning or oddly alluring, this is not just one of the world’s most unusual specialty coffees. At $1,100 per kilogram ($500 per pound), it’s also among the world’s priciest.

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Here in Hawaii, we don’t use elephants or civets or other animals to do our processing! It used to be that people said Hawaiian coffee was expensive at $20 a pound or so, but $500 a pound? Who buys this stuff?

Here we grow the coffee on trees that should last 50 years or more. We pick the cherry and unlike other fruit, we skin the fruit, keeping the seed and throwing away the fruit covering. Then we soak and dry the seeds (called parchment for the covering over them). When dry we send them to be milled, removing the parchment and storing the resultant green bean, to be soon roasted.

Although we have machines to do much of this work, this used to be mostly done by hand. In a pinch, small amounts of coffee cherry could be pulped by just squeezing the beans from the ripe cherry. The milling could be done with sharp fingernails, but again, only in small quantities because of the time it takes. Why even the green coffee beans could be roasted by hand, in a fry pan or in the oven.

So with a nod to often misquoted movie quotes, “Elephants, we don’t need no stinkin’ elephants”