Saturday, November 17, 2007 Monkey in my coffee By Ober Khok
WHAT will they think of next?
There’s this exotic coffee. No, not kape or kapeng barako (loosely translated as “brute coffee”), which is made in Batangas. It’s strong brewed coffee. So strong, it can melt a spoon with its richness.
While this is just a joke to cheer you up, business yields gourmet coffee from time to time to chase away boredom.
I once had cat in my coffee and it was delicious.
There wasn’t fur or whisker. It was aromatic. I made note of it, to which the café owner agreed. “It is from civet cats.”
I jumped out of my chair and nearly sprayed the café owner with hot coffee from my mouth. “Cat meat? Cat bone roasted till dark and good?”
The chap laughed at me. “It’s kape almid, or civet cat coffee. The cats eat the ripe coffee beans and ferment them in their tummy. Since they can’t digest the hard seeds, they excrete it.”
It takes a lot of washing and drying and processing, of course, and there’s not a trace of cat-thingy in the coffee.
Now comes this Taiwan coffee that will drive connoisseurs to dance like a wind-up monkey toy from so much pleasure.
Taiwanese farmers, the news said, get a little help from their furry friends. Not cats. Monkeys.
They have a name: Formosan rock monkeys. They, like the alamid, love coffee also and eat the ripe berries and spit out the half-chewed seeds.
According to the news: “The monkeys pick the reddest fruits to eat, and spit out the seeds. They cannot swallow them because that may cause indigestion,” said Liao Ching-tung, a coffee farmer for 30 years who has recently taken up roasting the regurgitated seeds.
That makes the job of removing the skin and pulp from the coffee beans. What a bonus.
Adding to the lore, the farmers claim the seeds have a sweet taste, even having a hint of vanilla. Perhaps the story works because a pound is about $56 a pound and selling rather well.
Those who have tasted it say it has no after-taste.
My kape alamid had no after-taste either. Well, just the feeling that I paid a high price for something I can get from a plastic packet, a 3-in-one clone of the gourmet drink.
However, you have to pay for mystery and lore—sometimes with money, sometimes with a broken heart. (ober.khok@yahoo.com)
