The last stop on our $10 Countryside Tour of Da Lat was the weasel poop coffee plantation. The first thing you should know about it, is that the animal that eats and poops out the coffee bean is not actually a weasel. It’s a luwak. The second thing you need to know is that it’s not unique to Vietnam no matter what the guide will tell you.
How the concept of weasel poop coffee was discovered, I don’t know and I’d like to keep it that way. Basically, the animal eats coffee beans and chooses only the best ones to eat. This ensures that all the coffee that comes out of the process, pun intended, is of the highest quality. While it’s inside the weasel, it gets fermented which adds to the flavor.
Once it’s pooped out, the beans are collected and dried in the sun. Then they are thoroughly washed and finally, they are carefully peeled. So the actual coffee been was never in contact with the poop, only it’s shell was. That makes it a lot less gross, right?
Well, the grossest part of the entire process isn’t the poop but the treatment of the animals. They are kept in tiny cages and only fed coffee beans. At this particular plantation you can see a bunch of these luwaks in their cages and they don’t look particularly clean or happy. Although I tried the coffee at the time, I wouldn’t do it again because of the exploitation of these animals. But I’m not here to preach animal rights!
As I previously mentioned, Vietnamese people will claim that weasel coffee originated in Vietnam. It’s just like pierogi in Europe. Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and probably several other nationalities claim that the dumplings originated from their country. As a Ukrainian I will tell you that duh, they are Ukrainian. But I’m clearly biased…
Several other countries in South East Asia, including Indonesia will claim that luwak coffee is theirs. In Bali I visited a coffee plantation that claimed the coffee as their own and I’m willing to bet that Indonesia isn’t the only place that tries to take credit for it. Then there’s Thailand that does the same thing with elephants and every single of these countries will also boast that their coffee is the best and most expensive in the world.
Back to the Da Lat coffee plantation. The multi-floored building was beautiful, smelled amazing and had the most spectacular view of the mountains and coffee fields. We drank some coffee, did some souvenir shopping on the top floor and pet all the cute dogs. Apparently the owner loves to rescue dogs and there were at least 20 living at the coffee plantation. I wonder if dog poop coffee will ever become a trend…
The entire Da Lat Countryside tour about 6 hours and included a rose garden, minority village, Buddhist pagoda, elephant waterfall, lunch, silk farm, cricket farm and the weasel poop coffee plantation. It was an informative and fun tour and our guide was enthusiastic and insightful. I would definitely recommend this tour to anyone visiting Da Lat, but remember to haggle if they try to charge you more than $10 per person.
At the end of the tour they made sure to ask if we wanted to get dropped off at our hotels or somewhere else and most of the group ended up at the famous Crazy House. We decided to check it out too and had a great time. I’ll tell you all about it next time, so stay tuned!
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