Vietnam Weasel coffee – The story behind the world most expensive coffee

Vietnamese Coffee, one of the most famous and expensive coffee in the world, have you known its story?

Weasels are listed as carnivores but they are into eating ripen coffee berries when the harvest season comes. Such a wonderful gift from Mother Nature that weasels itself has an instinct of finding the sweetest and ripest coffee berries to eat. They climbed from trees to trees, looking for the best and perfectly ripe berries to “consume”. It’s not came out of the blue that farmers use this particular trait of the weasels as a sign of harvest perfect timing.

They pick the best coffee berries to eat, even if the farmer pick it for them, they only eat the best among those berries

This special animal always chose the best coffee berries to eat, they leave behind yellowish berries, unyielding berries, over-ripe berries… only pick up the best one. Unlike the rodents that eat the fruit’s flesh and trigger off its seeds, weasel just slightly chew the flesh and swallow the rest including the fruit’s seeds, this is the way weasel coffee is made.

Farmers collects Weasel’s poop

The history of Weasel coffee in Vietnam started thousand years ago. Following the French invasion at the 1800s, coffee was introduced in Vietnam, but the source of coffee back then was limited therefore it was considered as a luxury good, only the French colonists along with Nguyen dynasty’s nobles could have the right to drink it. Farmers, who were the one making coffee in contrast, had no chance to enjoy their work. They were forbidden from consuming coffee therefore the one and only way to drink coffee is to pick up Weasel poops, which was a block of coffee beans sticking together. They then realized this type of “poop coffee” was way more aromatic than the usual one that was served for the colonists, also the coffee taste was smoother and less bitter. These farmers discovered another strange feature of Weasel coffee while grinding it is that the coffee beans were perfectly protected by a thin silk pellicle, even before processing and still stick in the form of Weasel poop, they realized that the thin layers developed by the Weasels enzyme made coffee unharmed and fermented by the surrounding environment.

Weasel’s poops are being dried up

Weasel coffee once roasted, becomes extremely aromatic with vanilla – smelling, created a smooth and sweet after – taste coffee while the contained caffeine yet lessen but still preserved, therefore the pleasant feelings that people often associate with their first cup of coffee in the morning are not affected.

Coffee beans once get into weasel’s stomach, the coffee berry’s flesh will be digested under the circumstance of peptic system while the beans are synthesized with some particular enzymes come from the weasel’s digestive route, which will aromatize the beans when roasted and enhance the quality of coffee , makes it smooth later on. Also the coffee bean’s bitterness are mostly eliminated in this process, that why digested coffee is easier and tastier to drink. When the digestive process ends, 5kg of coffee berries is only 1.5kg of poop. The beans are carefully washed and then dried for three days in the sun, just like regular coffee. Then, they're ready for roasting, bagging, and selling.

Weasel Coffee at Huongmai Cafe is organic coffee, good for people health and extremly clean tasty

After the economic transformation in the middle of the 1900s, people chopped down trees to create crops, buildings, living area, transplants … to boost up national economic which was vastly influenced by the wars, the habitat of weasels therefore vastly influenced, too, coffee farmers no longer encounter weasels at their farm as well as its “lovely tiny” poops. To preserve the old good coffee as well as the Weasel species from the modernizing flow, coffee planters gathered weasels in wild life into their farm and feed them with perfectly ripe coffee berries along with many others fruits and meat or fish, because however Weasel is a Carnivore animal. Weasel coffee farm was initially created this way.

Weasel coffee 

Also by this “caging action” of farmers, Weasel coffee meets a lot of controversy. Cruel? I would love to write the word NO on my hand and punch some misinformed bloggers in the face. This is so NOT cruelty. Let me ask you this, do you love your dogs? Do you feed them? Do you keep them in the house in order to prevent them from running off? Yes you do, you do that for your cats, for your parrots, for your fishes, for YOUR DEAR PETS.

Then, do you eat pork? Do you eat beef? Do you eat chicken? Yes they are animals, you killed them by your protein demand and you eat them! Why a sashimi cooker never got into any trouble of something so called “cruelty free” but us? Who comes from the 3rd world country? Don’t act like feminist like that, please.

We DON’T kill weasel

We DON’T beat them

We DON’T slay them alive

We DON’T eat them

We do nothing to them but FEED them, PROTECT them from the threats of lessening habitats and help them MAINTAIN its breeds.

This is not cruel, this is so so so not cruel, don’t judging 3rd world countries like a savage and uncivilized tribe, or I will have to call you Jon Snow. 

Where there's profit, there's an industry that prizes efficiency. Worldwide, thousands of civets are used to make weasel coffee, at Huongmai’s farms in the highland of Da Lat and Lam Dong province, weasels have big cages and well – living standards, sometime they ar released out to the wild like ducks, and they came back! If you say “ weasel coffee are wild animals forced to live in tiny, dark cages without contact with others or anything different from coffee beans to eat”, sorry I have never encountered one, enlighten me if you know and show me, but for now this thing has never happened in any one of my farms. Let me tell you again, Weasel is carnivore, they eat meat and fish mostly. I’m Buddhism, I believe in karma and carnation.

Weasel’s poops at Huongmai Cafe. It’s poop, not flesh

It takes years for coffee tree to yield fruits. October, November, December are harvesting months. To have a productive crop, farmers have to irrigate trees adequately. Coffee tree’s branches must be cut regularly. Perfect depth of digging will help coffee trees get water and fertilizer easily, therefore it could grow rapidly and healthily. Farmers use NPK fertilizer 3 times per year and animal feces are used only after harvesting.

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