As any coffee connoisseur knows, the world's most expensive bean comes from the unlikeliest of places: a cat's behind.
That's right, the beans used to make Kopi Luwak coffee - which sells for upward of $200 a pound - are ingested as cherries by a Southeast Asian cat called the palm civet and harvested from the feline's feces.
Who came up with the idea to do this is anybody's guess. But Thomas and Amy Rhodes, owners of Zeke's Coffee in Lauraville, wanted to give their friends and customers the opportunity to try what's now considered a delicacy: coffee rid of its bitter aftertaste by the civet's stomach enzymes. Each year, only 1,000 pounds are produced worldwide.
Yesterday, Zeke's hosted the year's first of its twice-monthly exotic coffee tastings at the Mill Valley Farmers' Market, located in the old Baltimore Broom Machine Factory building at Sisson and 28th streets, just off the Jones Falls Expressway. In the coming weeks, the tastings will feature Jamaican Blue Mountain and Hawaiian Kona coffee. In the spring, there will be a daylong Ethiopian coffee-making ceremony.
But Thomas Rhodes, 40, knows the curiosity factor surrounding yesterday's event will be hard to top.
A hundred people bought $10 advance tickets, which were good for an 8-ounce serving and which sold out a few days before the event. The Rhodeses saved the final 20 servings of their special brew for walk-in farmers' market customers. Those were gone within an hour after the 9 a.m. opening.
The road to the tasting was a bumpy one. Thomas Rhodes started looking for beans online in October. He e-mailed an inquiry to animalcoffee.com, which - according to the Web site - provides Kopi Luwak to the Emmy Awards for celebrity gifts, Warner Brothers movie studios and the royal family of Kuwait.
Thomas Rhodes had trouble persuading the salesman to let him buy beans that he would roast himself at his roastery and retail shop, which supplies coffee to about 30 local businesses. Eventually, he paid $300 for 2 pounds unprocessed ("right out of the rear end"), only to realize he didn't know what to do with it.
"We kept it to show people what it looks like," said Amy Rhodes, 35, who met her husband in 1994 when the two worked in local theater and Thomas Rhodes had a side job at a coffee shop to make ends meet. "We're just gonna keep it sealed up. It'll be our souvenir."
