The traditionally chilly month of February showed itself from its best side last weekend: warm, sunny hours with temperatures reaching nearly 20 degrees lured people outdoors everywhere and spread a spring-like atmosphere. Who doesn’t like to think back on their last vacation? Travel is currently very limited due to the pandemic, but the rare Black Ivory coffee takes you on a flavor journey all the way to Thailand. Here, the animal-derived coffee is “refined” by elephants. That’s where the name Black Ivory—black ivory—comes from. The pachyderms are fed a mixture of fresh fruit, rice, and Thai Arabica beans. Just like with civets, these beans pass through the elephant’s gastrointestinal tract. The undigested beans are excreted by the elephants after up to 24 hours. The beans are then sorted by hand from the elephant dung, washed, and sun-dried. The purpose of the elephant’s digestion is said to be the removal of bitter compounds.
However, producing one kilogram of Black Ivory coffee is significantly more labor-intensive than with Kopi Luwak. These gentle pachyderms are not only large; they also have very large teeth. That is why not every coffee cherry seed ends up in the stomach. Many of them are crushed by the teeth of the elephants. Annual production is therefore well below 100 kilograms. This makes Black Ivory coffee the rarest coffee in the world.