SCIENTISTS have figured out why coffee beans harvested from the faeces of Asian palm civets taste so good (according to coffee connoisseurs, at least).
If you have no idea what you just read, basically, a cat-like animal native to South and Southeast Asia is fed coffee beans, and once it poos them out, the beans are packaged (hopefully after being cleaned) and sold for an exorbitant amount of money, because apparently they are far more delicious than regular beans.
Kopi luwak, or civet coffee beans, can sell for more than us$1,000 per kilogram, but there has long been debate about whether the unusual harvesting method actually changes the coffee's chemical composition.
Well, after collecting 68 poop samples from five estates growing Robusta coffee in Karnataka, India and comparing the chemical composition of the poo-beans against their undigested form, researchers found that the civet beans had a significantly higher total fat content, as well as much higher levels of two fatty acids.
In results published in Scientific Reports, the researchers concluded that the chemical differences in the civet coffee are a result of fermentation of the beans in the digestive system of the civets, and that the differences likely affect the coffee's final flavour.
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