TeaChat

Thought this might be of interest to some of you...

http://www.lbc.co.uk/panda-dung-is-secr ... -tea-52490

Are they using Panda dung as an additive to the tea or fertilizer? It sounds like fertilizer but it wouldn't surprise me if it was the former.

Sounds like another silly marketing stunt.

Reminds me of the weasel poop coffee beans!! Which surprisingly, has been the only coffee I've ever actually liked!!! Haha

interesting read, but I really doubt the claims to the teas improvement would be all that substantial. it would be like..me making and selling chawan out of a magical iron rich clay that only occurs here in south carolina. same idea.

waltersh wrote:Reminds me of the weasel poop coffee beans!!

Or Kopi Luak. Wild cats eat the beans, poo them out, and voila... a delicacy.

Lerxst2112 wrote:

waltersh wrote:Reminds me of the weasel poop coffee beans!!

Or Kopi Luak. Wild cats eat the beans, poo them out, and voila... a delicacy.

I know the beans get cleaned, roasted etc, but I can't imagine drinking something knowing it came out of a weasal op

Lerxst2112 wrote:

waltersh wrote:Reminds me of the weasel poop coffee beans!!

Or Kopi Luak. Wild cats eat the beans, poo them out, and voila... a delicacy.

About Kopi Luwak...

It´s not a weasel, or a cat...it´s a civet.

Coffee is the seed of a fruit, and civets like to eat that fruit when it ripens. So in places were civets live wild they run around the coffee plantations and eat the ripe coffee before the human coffee pickers can get to it. The seeds come through the civet digestive system mostly intact so by collecting the seeds from the droppings farmers could recover some of the lost income...or poor coffee pickers could get a little bit of coffee for their own use...but then this whole story about Kopi Luwak being the most awesome and expensive novelty coffee was created to increase the price....

Nowadays Kopi Luwak isn´t a mechanism to recover losses...it´s a big business since people who don´t know coffee get suckered in by the story. The civets are kept in tiny cages and force fed low grade, unsorted coffee which is then collected, washed, roasted and sold at super-premium prices that the coffee in no way deserves.

But why even bother feeding it to the civets? The people who buy this stuff don´t know anything about coffee anyway...so just label some low grade commodity coffee as Kopi Luwak and sell it for big bucks...and that´s exactly what happens.

Kopi Luwak is a scam...and if it´s real it´s animal cruelty...it´s low quality coffee and you really shouldn´t buy it.

And if it´s the only coffee you ever liked....that says more about how awful all the other coffee you´ve tried is not the quality of Kopi Luwak.

Here´s some more reading if you´re curious

http://www.coffeestrategies.com/2011/12 ... civet-cats

http://www.scaa.org/chronicle/2011/11/0 ... into-gold/

Mostly , you guys don't know shit!

beecrofter wrote:Mostly , you guys don't know shit!

Judging from what entroyembrace said.

I'd beg to differ.

It's actually the punchline from a joke about air travel where a young girl is engaged in conversation by her seat mates and she asks- If horses eat grass and cows eat grass and deer eat grass how come cows pass a big ol cow flop and deer little round turds and horses road apples ?
The question stumps her fellow passengers and the young girl looks at them and says why should I converse with you? , you guys don't know shit!

I knew you were being humorous so I returned in kind.
and yeah it really is kinda funny.

well not about the animal abuse but, you know what I mean.

Good background info, entropy.

This panda dung stuff is the same kind of gimmick, like monkey picked this and that. It's all marketing.

TwoDog2 wrote: This panda dung stuff is the same kind of gimmick, like monkey picked this and that. It's all marketing.

Yeah, exactly. They´re selling you a strange story not really good tea.

Usually the "most expensive" tea/artwork/ebay cheese/anything is what somebody would pay big money to buy. But sometimes the one who buys is with the one who sells, so the price tag is only for the rest of us to witness and be influenced with. That's my very cynical interpretation.