Infinitely Strange

Yes, strange, strange, infinitely strange is the world in which we live.

I happened on this last night, while cruising around the Internet. (I was, I confess, frittering away an idle hour in trying to test my two blogs' search engine visibility. I thought for a moment that I was now a Googlewhack for "panda abductions" - but then I discovered that 'the rules' for this bizarre hobby are that your combined search terms should not be in quotations: that's harsh.)

I assumed at first that this had to be a joke: a rare gourmet coffee which acquires its unique characteristics as a result of being passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet. This animal likes to feast on coffee berries, apparently, and then shits out the supposedly intact beans in convenient-to-collect logs (below). Coffee connoisseurs speculate that the creature's digestive enzymes, although not harming the sheath of the beans, somehow nevertheless enhance the complex flavour and aroma of the final product. This rare and expensive coffee is mainly produced in Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi (where 'Luwak' is the local name for the animal), although versions of it are also made elsewhere in South-East Asia, notably the Phillipines and Vietnam (where it is unappealingly referred to as 'weasel coffee').

A finely-judged April's Fools' Day jest, surely? Slightly gross, definitely outlandish, but frighteningly plausible.

Well, if it's a joke, there are an awful lot of people out there who have been taken in by it, or who are colluding in propagating it. A large number of coffee companies and connoisseurs' fan-sites include references to it. Even dear old Wikipedia has an item about it - not that Wikipedia is foolproof, but I do think they would have sniffed out a hoax by now.

That animated picture, though, I'm still not sure about. I don't know the provenance of it - genuine advertising campaign by one of the coffee sellers, or some wag's piss-take of this most unusual of brews?

Does anyone have more information on this?


Note: The advertising picture at the top of this post actually has a rather groovy - rather gross - animation, but it seems to have stopped displaying on the blog (at least when viewed via Firefox). If you click on the picture to view it in a separate window, you should be able to see the animation.