When I was in Vietnam once in a restaurant I saw ridiculously high price for a cup of coffee. I was surprised, and asked a waiter why this is so. She answered me it’s “Kopi Luwak”. At that moment this explanation didn’t help me much, but it did a few days after I had a chance to visit a local farm that produces this kind of coffee.
It was fun indeed.
So the reason is that they have a lot of special animals, called
“palm civets” or something like that. They feed them coffee beans, and then after a cycle, they collect these partially digested beans for future coffee production. There is a special cult about this process. It costs almost as much as gold, but I was warned that there are a lot of counterfeit products.
Frankly, I was not too eager to taste it, but I managed. I also bought a big pack of this coffee for my friends (they asked me before my trip), but I still didn’t understand why they asked me for that. I was not impressed to put it mildly, but it made me think about the market of posh products in general.
It seems to me that people like to pay for special characteristics even if they result in worse products afterwards. I have visited many restaurants in my life and tasted many different things, but I still think that the best products were just simple, fresh and ordinary dishes. Never in my life have I found something great in posh restaurants besides white cloth-tables and silverware.
As for me, the same thing happened with kopi luwak — over-complicated process, ridiculous price, and pretty average result at the end.
Would you like to try such coffee?
Do you agree with my conclusion?
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