The Disturbing Secret Behind the World’s Most Expensive Coffee (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The Disturbing Secret Behind the World’s Most Expensive Coffee (2016)

nationalgeographic.com

13 pointslelf25 comments

People care more about this because the animals involved are cute and fluffy, but this is pretty much just regular factory farming. (Which itself is a hellish indictment of humanity, of course.)

This is true and we've been trained to not think about our common, normalized farming realities here. That applies not just to meat & dairy but to the mass production & harvest of fruits and vegetables as well.

I mean, who is really going to drink it and then say, this doesn't taste right, and then verify that the beans are really eaten and pooped out by cats... And then will it cause outrage that the beans were never truly eaten and pooped out?

Do actually "intelligent" people truly drink coffee that is harvested in this manner?

What a sham.

not just that.

also the cats are now an endangered species.

Just as a PSA - I develop food and beverage products (both premium and mass market) with Analytical Flavor Systems (a predictive platform for flavor);

no one in the industry - not a single person who knows anything about coffee - would recommend civet coffee. Its a marketing gimmick of the worst kind. Its destructive, a-historical, and does not result in a better product.

Any random "3rd wave" coffee is better, and if you want a fruity-fermented profile, just look for a "natural process" or "honey processed" coffee.

I'm with you. Tried it once but even some cheap beans from the supermarket are better in taste.

Do you have suggestions for premium coffee brands for regular coffee drinkers like myself? The most I've had is Starbucks and I find it pretty good, but I'm not averse to kicking it up a notch.

Counter Culture is the best in the business right now; they are wholesale only (they don't own cafes), but their coffee is used by high-end cafes across the USA and available online.

Oh, wow. There are so many brands out there, from small boutique roasting shops to medium-sized commercial roasters who produce vastly superior product to Starbucks. Nearly any roaster who roasts to order will be better than Starbucks.

I use a local one called Specialty Java because they're decent, less expensive, and the shipping is a low courier fee, or even free for will-call. I can recommend them if you are not used to the 3rd-wave ultra-light roasts. Most of their stuff is medium roast, and nothing is burnt like the majority of Starbucks beans.

I think the disturbing thing here is, being in Indiana, I can't do a damn thing about it. I've never had the chance to buy it, would not have bought it to begin with, and not even seen it on the market.

But this article makes me feel bad and emotionally drains me, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

i wish HN have more ways for me to tag and hide posts. i get the "intellectual curiosity" part of off-topic posts but we got reddit for that.

any subreddits you'd recommend where intelligent conversation can be found?

Any one that's new enough to have less than [insert critical mass number here, varies by topic] comments.

Wait until they discover how milk is made...

From mother Almonds of course.

I tried a cup in Bali, and couldn’t tell any difference. It’s just coffee. I think it’s just a gimmick with a fake value add.

To be fair low-acidity coffee might not taste much different but it shouldn't wreck your stomach like most coffee does.

With that being said I believe you can just grow low-acidity strains.

Compared to tap water, sea water is alkaline. Some folks prefer to add a pinch of salt to their coffee. Choosing sea salt in this context results in less acidic coffee.

Adding salt to water does not result in any chemical reactions, so the salt will not alter the pH level of water or the resulting coffee brew in any way. Most people just add milk/cream to alter the pH to neutralize acidity, but if you want to keep it black you need to use baking soda, not salt. Just a pinch, you don't need much.

Perhaps you are thinking of "salt" as just NaCl. Sea Salt contains more minerals than just that - Magnesium being a prominent one. Magnesium is alkaline, and therefore, coffee with Sea Salt added is more alkaline than just regular coffee.

I don't like the acidity much either. Cold brew is pretty good in this regard.

Clickbait 2016 title, it's almost vintage. (This, of course, is/was not at all a secret, even 4 years ago)

There's a paywall. Could only see the first sentence about Civet feces

"[...] as civet coffee has gained popularity, and with Indonesia growing as a tourist destination where visitors want to see and interact with wildlife, more wild civets are being confined to cages on coffee plantations. In part, this is for coffee production, but it’s also so money can be made from civet-ogling tourists.

Civet dung, studded with partially digested coffee beans, used to be collected from the wild. Increasingly, civets are instead kept in cramped, unsanitary cages on coffee plantations."

That's the gist of it

Well, if that's not enough to convince you to subscribe, I don't know what would be.

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