We love a good bargain in the UK which is why at the Wholesale Coffee Company, the products we supply such as commercial coffee machines, and coffee bean supplies are excellently priced without the quality being compromised.
But, not everyone loves a bargain. There’s a coffee shop in Melbourne selling coffee for $25 a cup. The Geisha coffee, also nick-named the ‘God shot’ takes four minutes to make and the brewing process involves bunsen burners and is said to look a bit like a school science project. The result is a coffee that tastes rather like tea with a jasmine and strawberry aroma – intriguing.
Moving things up a notch to the Maldives – home to the world’s most expensive coffee beans – is the elephant dung coffee, going for about $50 a cup. It sounds like something from Brass Eye, but coffee from an elephant’s bum can be found on the menu at Antara Resorts in the Maldives and Antantara’s Golden Triangle property in Thailand.
The coffee beans, called ‘Black Ivory’ are being sold for a massive $1,100 per kilo, the equivalent of £693.11 – all because they’ve passed through the bum of an elephant. But it’s not just about the gimmick.
Coffee beans that have been naturally refined by elephants are less bitter because during the digestion period, the elephant enzymes break the coffee protein down as it’s the protein in coffee beans that’s responsible for the bitter taste. The outcome is a coffee with a chocolate, floral, nutty aroma with traces of red berry and spice.
It doesn’t end with elephants though – there are other similarly if not more bizarre and fascinating coffee bean creations out there such as civet coffee which is made from the poo of civet cats, coffee beans made from deer dung and finally, there’s even a special breed of bat that can harvest coffee.