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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.
... 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."
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."
The real story seems to be rather interesting. From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak :
During the era of Cultuurstelsel (1830—1870), the Dutch prohibited the native farmers and plantation workers from picking coffee fruits for their own use. Still, the native farmers wanted to have a taste of the famed coffee beverage. Soon, the natives learned that certain species of musang or luwak (Asian Palm Civet) consumed the coffee fruits, yet they left the coffee seeds undigested in their droppings. The natives collected these luwaks' coffee seed droppings, then cleaned, roasted and ground them to make their own coffee beverage.[9] The fame of aromatic civet coffee spread from locals to Dutch plantation owners and soon became their favorite, yet because of its rarity and unusual process, the civet coffee was expensive even in colonial times.
Pan??? I hold each bean individually, betwixt my fingers, whilst balancing a magnifying glass on my nose, directing the sunlight over each precious shit-nugget. I'll have my first cup in 2016. Can't wait.