Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Thorstein Veblen was the twinkly eyed 19th-century economist who coined — an appropriate word — the phrase conspicuous consumption. He thus gave name to one of the defining traits of any era: the tendency for the rich, the aspirational and the indebted to use expensive tat as peacock semaphore for their real or desired status.
Veblen goods are items — caviar, a handbag, wine — whose demand rises along with their price, the opposite of the rule that generally applies. And now a new company called Bespoke Beverages, founded by Richard Hardwick, a former rugby player turned musical theatre actor, is about to start selling the ultimate Veblen good: coffee costing £31,000 a kilo, or £300 a cup — almost certainly the most expensive ever made.
Kopi luwak, civet coffee, is sieved from caffeinated cat crap. The wide-eyed and ferrety Asian palm civet, a vicious viverrid, eats raw coffee cherries and squeezes out the pips, or beans, which the farmer harvests and washes before they’re packed and sent to be roasted, ground, brewed and drunk by the rich.
Supposedly, enzymes in the animal’s digestive tract denature proteins in the beans and improve the flavour. The coffee usually costs about £400 a kilo, but Bespoke Beverages has gone rather further by packaging the stuff in a handmade carbon-fibre and white-gold box and by Veblenishly limiting the supply.
The company lets me try its KL Diamond at a breakfast at Mossiman’s in Belgravia, central London, a private club beloved of royals. I watch two men measure the grounds into a little beaker, like cardinals handling the powdery relics of a long-dead saint, before dropping them into elaborate Breaking Bad siphons. When the pressure reaches the right level, the coffee gurgles up into the jugs.
The drink is thick and murky and smells of tar, pine sap and, more persistently, the unswerving Nescafé punch of its robusta beans. The flavour is different from that of any coffee I’ve tried, with tart tangs of lemon, a tongue-smearing smoothness, no bitterness and a thick, intestinal savour reminiscent of gutting pheasants. The discerning woman opposite me — an expert in the ways and foibles of the rich — insists the overriding flavour is broccoli. It is delicious, in its strange, blunted and bitterless way, but at well over a pony a sip, it is impossible to justify.
It has taken the company a couple of years to get this product to market, and the launch could not be coming at a worse time. Last autumn hidden-camera documentaries by the BBC and the animal-rights group Peta found civet cats pacing dementedly in stifling cages, their fur falling out.
Tony Wild, who claims to have introduced kopi luwak to Britain in the 1980s, told me: “In the wild the beans are only a tiny part of the civets’ diet. This is like a human drinking more than 100 cups of coffee a day. The animals are so stressed, cramped and over-caffeinated they can start chewing their own legs off.”
Hardwick, however, insists that his company uses only wild civets in Indonesia. “We treat our beans like diamonds. To cage an animal for them is crazy,” he says.
None of this is likely to matter to Bespoke Beverages’ customers in seven-star hotels, rococo gastrotemples, dry Middle Eastern palaces and dachas on the Black Sea. There, they know more about price than they do about pleasure, and could do with reading their Veblen.
