Care for a cup of elephant-dung coffee?

Would you pay AED 200 for a cup of coffee if you knew the beans were processed inside the guts of an elephant? Thailand's Black Ivory Coffee is probably the limit when it comes to going organic. Hand-picked beans are fed to elephants along with a mixture of fruit and rice. The beans pass through the pachyderms' intestines and are excreted with its dung. The process strips the beans of their acidic content leaving behind coffee fetches $1,100 per kilogram, making it the priciest coffee in the world.

Miki Giles from Hong Kong tastes the Black Ivory Coffee at breakfast as Meena, a 6-year-old baby elephant, gets curious at the Anantara Golden Triangle resort in Golden Triangle, northern Thailand. Black Ivory Coffee, started by Canadian coffee expert Blake Dinkin, is made from Thai arabica hand-picked beans. Coffee beans are naturally refined by a Thai elephant. It takes about 15-30 hours for the elephant to digest the beans, and later they are plucked from their dung and washed and roasted. Approximately 10,000 beans are picked to produce 1 kg of roasted coffee. At USD 1,100 per kilogram or USD 500 per pound, the cost per serving of the elephant coffee equals USD 50, making the exotic new brew the world's priciest. It takes 33 kilograms of raw coffee cherries to produce 1 kilo of Black Ivory Coffee. less

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| Photo by Paula Bronstein / Getty Images

Tue, Dec 11, 2012 1:00 PM AST (Arabian)