There is a Starbucks in Stockholm

I have a Japanese friend who loves Starbucks and who has lived in Sweden. We actually met when she was studying Swedish in Stockholm and I was in Stockholm to graduate and tried not to forget the little Japanese I had learned during my first six months in Japan.

My friend always complains that there are no Starbucks in Sweden. The Swedish image of American coffee is that it is very bad. I don't drink coffee and I have only spent three days in the U.S. so I don't know much myself, but the coffee drinking Swedes I know call American coffee "dirty water". But they do say that if you have to drink coffee in America, Starbucks is one of the better choices among the dirty waters available.

Anyway, I found a Starbucks inside the Stockholm central train station.

Civet shit coffee

Expensive civet shit coffee on the right, normal coffee on the left

A Canadian professor I know told me that he had found a shop that sold you coffee beans and then roasted the beans for you while you waited. The also sold coffee beans that are collected from the shit of Indonesian palm civets.

Apparently the thinking is that since these cats eat coffee fruits, they are probably picky and eat mainly the good fruits. Using beans that come from fruits eaten by these animals would then give you coffee beans of a higher quality than normal, since they have been "civet approved".

Also, by passing through the civet, the enzymes etc. of the civet intestines change the beans slightly, and this might be a change for good.

This type of coffee beans are very expensive and quite rare. Then there are apparently coffee beans from elephant shit too, which is even more rare and expensive. They did not sell this in the coffee shop in Paris, though.

I figured drinking coffee made from beans shit out by a palm civet would at least make a nice story for my blog, so I asked him to show me where the coffee shop was. We went there together, but it turned out they do not serve civet shit coffee in their cafeteria area.

They do however serve you coffee made form your own beans if you have beans that you have bought there. So my professor friend went back to his hotel (across the street from the shop) and got his civet shit beans and asked the barista to make us two civet shit espressos and one "normal" espresso, so I could compare the tastes.

I then had one normal (I guess fairly high quality, based on the type of coffee shop) espresso and one civet shit espresso. There was not much difference between the two. The expensive one seemed slightly milder, but since I knew it was much more expensive it could just be a psychological effect. I liked the expensive one better, though.

The coffee beans are called "kopi luwak", by the way.