Kopi Luwak - expensive coffee

Kopi Luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world. The Kopi Luwak is mainly produced in the Indonesian archipelago. A cup of Kopi Luwak can be sold for around $50 around the world.
A special animal called the Asian Palm Civet is needed to obtain this pricey coffee. This is animal gives the strange name to this coffee. Kopi is the Indonesia name for coffee and Luwak is the local name of the Asian Palm Civet.

So what is so special about this coffee? First of all the process to collect the beans is quite extraordinary.
The coffee beans, which are cultivated on fields, get eaten by the Luwak. The fruit pulp gets digested by the Luwak, but the seeds pass by the stomach and are defecated. Inside the Luwak's stomach and intestine the seeds get some time to ferment and give the special taste to the coffee. The dung of this animal is collected. The seeds are washed and sun dried. After this process the seeds are slightly roasted as to keep their special taste.

So how does it taste? A bit difficult to describe. As i tried this coffee, I felt it didn't taste bitter as most coffees do. It had a mild and even fruity taste.
But damn it's expensive for a cup!

Faces of Rajasthan

In the future some more reports of India will follow. To celebrate this, a first post about portraits of Rajasthan people:

Invisible man from China

Liu Bolin is a Chinese Photographer-artist. He specialised himself in the art of invisibility and is now famous for his special art form. He will study a place and then paint himself so as to melt away in the picture. Every pictures takes him more than 10 hours of work.
Some of his works have a political undertone and in 2005 the Chinese government closed down his art studio. This didn't stop him and he now has a International reputation.

He work is sometimes compared to the children books "Where's Waldo?"