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Researchers Discover Way To Spot Crappy Coffee
sciencehabit writes "People who enjoy the most expensive coffee in the world can soon sip without worry: Researchers have come up with a way to tell if their cuppa joe is real or faux. The luxury drink in question—Kopi Luwak—is produced from coffee beans pooped out by the palm civet, a time-consuming process that helps contribute to the beverage's price tag of between $330 to $500 per kilogram. In a new study, researchers chemically analyzed four different blends of coffee—authentic Kopi Luwak, regular coffee, a 50/50 mix of the two, and a brew of coffee beans that producers had chemically treated in an attempt to simulate mammalian digestion. Of the hundreds of organic substances naturally present in coffee, a handful enabled the team to distinguish Kopi Luwak from the other brews. The technique may even be sensitive enough to distinguish pure Kopi Luwak from versions adulterated with varying percentages of other coffees—which offers some degree of reassurance when your morning mud costs about $15 a cup."
Look for the Starbucks logo.
Oh shit!
In this case, I'll prefer the fake.
The things that pass for delicacies.
Always check the expiration date on your coffee. There's a good chance a fair bit of the product on the shelf hasn't been rotated and some of it is either close to expiring or already expired.
Source: I work night crew at a grocery store. I regularly check the coffee for expiration dates on the exceedingly rare chance I have extra time.
... at my favorite coffee haunt. They have the palm civet right there, squatting over your cup.
Have gnu, will travel.
It goes something like this. I go to the store. I take samples of everything, then bring them home. When I wake up in the morning, I try one. One of four things will happen:
a) It does nothing. Bad coffee.
b) It gives me just enough juice to make it to the shower, where I fall asleep again. Bad coffee.
c) It gives me a big jolt, and I say 'fuck work' and submit a new linux kernel patch. Okay coffee.
d) ZOMFGThisIsThe GreatestCupOfCoffee InTheWorldCanIHave AnotherHolyShit EverythingIsSoClear IWantToDoAllTheThings RightNowHolyShit FuckOnAHeartAttack... Good coffee.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Here I thought they were going to discern the quality of coffee, not whether it's been shat by a civet cat. I've no interest in tasting cat-shit coffee at any price.
Now if they'd have come up with a way to quantify the robustness, the body, the acidity, the richness, the roast, and so on for *sane* coffee, I'd have had to read the article. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
goes digging through an animal's shit, picking out the beans to brew coffee?
There was corn in my shit yesterday, did someone one to pick the kernels out to make popcorn?
Fortunately, for the time being, I don't need that much sophistication to stay away from coffee shitted by a mamal: the price tag seems to be a good enough indicator.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
If you can't tell the difference from the taste, stop paying $300 per kilogram.
I was in Indonesia not too long ago and got to try some of this kopi luwak. From what I learned even the "real" stuff isn't really authentic. Most of what is sold is from civets that are raised on farms and force fed coffee beans. Part of the reason this coffee is supposed to be so good is in the wild the civets will only choose to eat the best coffee beans it can find. Force feeding them kind of defeats this and is cruel.
When first-world problems: "Waaaah my coffee wasn't shat out of something's asshole!!!"
If you are paying $15 a cup for coffee then presumably you have super awesome taste buds. So why do you need chemically analyse your coffee to tell if it's the real deal? You're coffee is either worth $15 or it isn't based on what it tastes like.
What a pointless bit of research. Have we now solved so many of the world's important problems that the top of the list is now "make sure hipsters are drinking genuine cat's bum coffee."
produced from coffee beans pooped out by the palm civet
Huh, I didn't think the title meant literally crappy.
I have you and your ilk to thank for the drek that is Starbucks. What made them big was their coffee is higher in caffeine than most.
Listen, you hipster wannabe geek... caffeine content is the only thing a true geek cares about. Geeks are devices for turning caffeine into code. Therefore, if you want lots of code, you need lots of caffeine. We don't care that it was made by the loving natives of... some country... brewed in a steamomaster 9000 with auto bean injectors, slow-roasted in an artistic clay pot. You care, because you're a wannabe. We only care about two things: That it's hot, and that it makes anyone who drinks it twitch like a politician being asked about his sexual misconduct.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"Delicacy" is better thought of as a code word for "look at the crazy shit we just fed to that tourist."
are you always in the habit of referring to "girls" as "sir"?
Now now, be nice. He has to rationalize it somehow, otherwise... his male ego would be crushed by the thought that a guh... gu... a gurrrrrrl smacked him so hard on an internet forum his kids will be born dizzy. And so, to keep his idea of girls as subserviant little playthings for his penis... and him as the big and powerful penis owner... anyone who so completely and utterly destroys him as we have just done, simply can't be a..a... a girl.
In other news, my geek-fu is strong. Now, get lost, or (puts on a fez) I shall taunt you a second time! ;)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Finally, they have a chemical process to verify that the $500/kg coffee is, in fact, Kopi Luwak. Thank goodness! Gone are the days of me paying $500/kg for coffee and not being able to tell if it's Kopi Luwak or just Folger's. I'm a discerning customer with stringent tastes. I want to know if the $500/kg coffee I'm drinking is actually high-quality. I don't want any of that $5/kg shit being passed off as $500/kg coffee, and then I don't notice and get ripped off.
Really, none of what you said made any sense.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That the animal has eaten and pooped it out obviously.
I assume it changes the flavor, or just if flashy.
That being shat out makes a change in flavor indicates the flavor imbued is that of the shitting process itself.
Ah, the taste of Shit. Humans are made of and do produce shit. We refine all things shit and burn shit in our cars.
Energy collapsed into matter and Stars digested this and shat out all the heavier elements that make up all the exquisite flavors of the world.
Nature's cruel joke is that the ultimate digestion the cosmos hordes for itself alone.
You will never know the true flavor of a black hole's shit.
Turdukenivet Coffee. Closer than anything on the planet to tasting the Universe's ass.
I counted 102 beans in my coffee scoop. I weighed a scoop at 15 grams which gives 30 scoops to a pound (454 g ). This means there are 3060 beans in a pound. At a price $400/pound civet coffee comes out to 7.65 cents per bean.
I measured Brazilian coffee, not civet. The real number may differ.
.
"Delicacy" is better thought of as a code word for "look at the crazy shit we just fed to that tourist."
Delicacy tends more to be some horrible crap that poor people would eat to survive. For example haggis, the Scots delicacy is made from all the garbage left over after that you cant sell after you butcher a sheep. It's padded out with oats and has the bad taste of the offal covered up with spices. Seems this coffee started out in a similar way. Poor people not allowed the coffee beans found some they were allowed to use in cat shit. mmmm the taste of culture mixed with the chic of poverty. So now they can't eat them from the trees or harvest them from cat crap. Poor guys lose again.
I think people spending $500/kg for coffee deserve to be ripped off when actually buying an bag Nabob with some cat shit sprinkled in it for flavor.
Seriously, though, there is a problem with a culture of people willing to pay the high price for speciality coffee or wine, but then can't tell the difference from counterfeit. Its not a problem with the counterfeit being that good, its the problem with douchey hipsters thinking that their coffee is actually better because it costs more when they can't tell the freakin' difference from a much cheaper brand. I think if you can't tell you are drinking crap, you have a problem no device is going to solve.
All these kinds of coffee and wine detectors do is reinforce the douchey poser culture that wants to emerge from the 99% by pretending to act like they belong in the 1% drinking their $50 cup of disgusting coffee.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I thought this way when I lived in Seattle. Now that I live on the East Coast I find that Starbucks hits the 90th percentile for quality around here. Standardization of shit is a huge step up in most of the country.
To give you an idea of how bad it is- most people here seem to think that Dunken' Donuts has the best coffee.
God do I miss a perfectly pulled shot of espresso where the bitterness is only on the tip of your tongue and there is no salty aftertaste.