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Macaca Coffee

By: Santosh :+: Under: Business, It Happens Only in India
On: ⋅ July 24, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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We like macacas and we like coffee. So when we stumbled on this story, we could not resist running it. [PRWeb]

Trick question: Which is the one of the most (if not the most) expensive coffee blends in the world that India exports?

Chances are you have never heard of R. Miguel Coffee. Founded in 2007, coffee Roastmaster R. Miguel Meza imports exotic blends for serious coffee lovers. Among the truly exotic blends this coffee maestro serves up is monkey parchment coffee. Never heard of monkey parchment coffee? It’s served on tree branches in Chikmagular in India.

It all begins with the Rhesus Monkeys in Chikmagular, India. “The Monkey Parchment coffee comes from coffee beans that have been chewed on by Rhesus Monkeys that have enjoyed the sweet flavor of the coffee cherries throughout its existence in time.”

Apparently, those sneaky macacas have been enjoying “a cup of joe” way before us. An expensive one, at that!!

An exotic novelty unmatched without comparables in a category of its own, the Monkey Parchment is respectively the most expensive coffee currently sold in the US.

At $250 a pound, it’s pretty hard to argue with the “most expensive tag”.

All this money is for coffee whose beans have chewed up and spit up by monkeys.

“After chewing on the fruit for several minutes, they spit the coffee parchment covered seed out onto the forest floor. The next step is less leisurely and becomes trickier. Trained workers search the forest floors of Chikmagular to find the few seeds that the monkeys have chewed on.” Those preciously left-over seeds are then thoroughly rinsed, washed, processed and dried.
The resulting raw coffee after the intricate sequence is a set of grey beans, embedded with occasional tooth marks, unlike the typical green color of regular raw beans. The Monkey Parchment is also quite distinct from other Indian Arabica coffee in taste, considering the specific enzymatic breakdown of the fruit that occurs in the monkeys’ mouth.

Meza who discovered this coffee on a recent trip to India sums up the taste as “the sweetest and most complex Indian Arabica coffee I have ever tasted” and describes the coffee as “coffee is extremely heavy bodied with a pleasant rounded acidity and seemingly no bitterness“. Being a computer programmer by profession (big surprise there), who is regularly faced with long hours and short deadlines, I’m an avid coffee drinker myself but of the commercial Starbucks variety only, so I’ll take an expert’s word for reviews of exotic brands. Besides I’m way too cheap to pay $250 for a pound of coffee.

So what makes this coffee so expensive?

RMiguel Coffee has made the Monkey Parchment available in America for the first time, but in very limited quantities. Due to the lengthiness in time that it takes to collect any substantial amount of coffee, only a few hundred defined pounds were produced.

Have anyone of our readers from that area of India ever heard of this method of coffee production? Have you ever tasted coffee made this way or, rather, what is the most exotic coffee blend you ever had?

*This is part 1 of a two post series. In the second part, we will have a short Q&A with the man who introduced this coffee to the world, R. Miguel Meza. We will talk about the lack of Indian coffee blends in major American coffee producers like Starbucks and Folgers and also briefly delve on how “Monkey Parchment Coffee” is doing its bit in helping the local economy of Chikmagular*

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