Researchers Discover Way To Spot Crappy Coffee 184
sciencehabit writes "People who enjoy the most expensive coffee in the world can soon sip without worry: Researchers have come up with a way to tell if their cuppa joe is real or faux. The luxury drink in question—Kopi Luwak—is produced from coffee beans pooped out by the palm civet, a time-consuming process that helps contribute to the beverage's price tag of between $330 to $500 per kilogram. In a new study, researchers chemically analyzed four different blends of coffee—authentic Kopi Luwak, regular coffee, a 50/50 mix of the two, and a brew of coffee beans that producers had chemically treated in an attempt to simulate mammalian digestion. Of the hundreds of organic substances naturally present in coffee, a handful enabled the team to distinguish Kopi Luwak from the other brews. The technique may even be sensitive enough to distinguish pure Kopi Luwak from versions adulterated with varying percentages of other coffees—which offers some degree of reassurance when your morning mud costs about $15 a cup."
Grocery Store Secrets (Score:3, Interesting)
Always check the expiration date on your coffee. There's a good chance a fair bit of the product on the shelf hasn't been rotated and some of it is either close to expiring or already expired.
Source: I work night crew at a grocery store. I regularly check the coffee for expiration dates on the exceedingly rare chance I have extra time.
Money well spent on that research (Score:5, Interesting)
What a pointless bit of research. Have we now solved so many of the world's important problems that the top of the list is now "make sure hipsters are drinking genuine cat's bum coffee."
7.65 cents per bean. (Score:4, Interesting)
I counted 102 beans in my coffee scoop. I weighed a scoop at 15 grams which gives 30 scoops to a pound (454 g ). This means there are 3060 beans in a pound. At a price $400/pound civet coffee comes out to 7.65 cents per bean.
I measured Brazilian coffee, not civet. The real number may differ.
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