Sorry for all the posts related to coffee (been obsessed with it lately), but I just found out that the most expensive coffee in the world comes out of the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet (pictured left).They eat the coffee cherries, of which the coffee beans pass through unharmed and are collected from the floor of the Sumatran jungles, and poof! you have Kopi Luwak. Kopi is Indonesian for coffee and Luwak is the local name for the civet.
Apparently (according to Wikipedia), Kopi Luwak ranges from $120 to $600 per pound. A quick search shows that a pound of Arabica roast on Animalcoffe.com is $180. Yowsers!
So why does it taste so good? The civet has evolved to pick out the ripest and best beans for consumption, and also, according to this article, the acids in the civet's stomach breaks down and leaches out some of the protein (proteins are what makes coffee bitter during the roasting process).
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