Elephant feces. The most expensive coffee in the world is made from elephant dung
In general, today I’m telling you how paper is made from elephant poop in Sri Lanka (excuse me, but I somehow don’t like the word “feces”)
Directly on the territory of the elephant nursery is a factory for the processing of elephant poop, although the "factory" is what they call themselves. In fact, a small house with one huge room, and a backyard where everything happens. To prevent tourists from mistaking this factory for an ordinary house, the walls outside are painted with pictures of the “What an elephant eats and what happens to this food afterward” process. Near the door of the house there is a man on duty who very persistently invites tourists to come inside. Somehow I didn’t really want to come in, but the barker asked very much “Just come in and see, it’s free”, and his conviction that everything “smells good” convinced me to come in and satisfy my exorbitant curiosity. Of course, the trick was later - after they show and tell you everything, you will be taken to a shop where all the souvenirs are made from elephant poop. To be fair, I would say that some 
the stuff was pretty cute, but the price…. Everything is designed for wealthy tourists. I “got sick” to buy a notebook for 45 bucks, and even more so when I think about what it is made of, the price seems sky-high. In general, I didn’t buy anything, but I found out everything and photographed it, which I share.
First of all, elephant poop is collected throughout the reserve and dried. Dried poop does not smell (I confirm :)) because elephants are vegetarians. By the way, outwardly they look very much like cows, we have such heaps in the Crimea, only smaller in size, lying all over the steppe. Only in the Crimea they used to dry them and in winter they heated stoves with them, because cows are also vegetarians and their dried poop does not smell. But back to the elephant bunches.
So, dried poop is placed in a special vat and boiled (all this takes place in the backyard) for 2 
days on low heat. Thus, bacteria are removed from this raw material. Then the mass is poured into a huge blender and brought to homogeneity for 2 hours. It turns out something like gruel of a grayish color. Now it's time to make sheets of paper, and everything else is already being made from them, up to figurines (pressed paper). Part of the mass is left gray, because many tourists prefer "all natural" products. For other tourists, paper is made differently. 
colored with natural dyes. Paint is added to the gray mass, most often obtained from flowers (orchids, lilies, roses, hydrangeas).
Now the mixture is poured into special molds. They are large rectangular frames that have a fine mesh instead of a bottom. Excess liquid drains, and a thin layer remains on the surface of the mesh. It is dried under the open sky - this is how sheets of paper are obtained from elephant poop. The paper is hard, so it is passed through a special press to make it soft (although it 
equally stiffer and thicker than regular paper).
And now what is made of such paper. Several girls are sitting in the room, who paint paper, make stamps ... in general, all kinds of crafts. Gray paper most often goes to wall calendars and notepads. Color - for all other crafts. Sometimes paper is cut into small pieces and figurines are made (like papier-mâché), and figurines are most often in the form of an elephant, which either replenishes its stomach or empties it.
And now some more photos.
The most expensive coffee in the world, called Black Tusk, is made from coffee beans eaten and digested by Thai elephants and costs $1,100 per kg. The exotic drink has a rich, mild taste due to the process of digestion in the intestines of an elephant.
“When an elephant eats coffee beans, the acid in its stomach breaks down coffee proteins, which gives the drink a bitter taste,” the experts explained. “The result is a coffee with a very mild taste without the bitterness of a regular drink.”
The most expensive and delicious coffee in the world is very similar to another type of Kopi Luwak coffee, which is obtained from the excrement of musang animals. However, the stomach of an elephant in this sense has a slight advantage. On average, it takes an animal about 15 to 30 hours to digest coffee beans, which are “languished” along with bananas, sugarcane and other ingredients of a typical elephant’s vegetarian diet, to produce a uniquely rich and fruity taste.
A rare variety of coffee can be tasted only at four resorts in the world: three in the Maldives and one in Thailand, and a cup of such a drink is not cheap - $ 50.
Why is it so expensive? Firstly, keeping elephants in the reserve is a costly business. Secondly, elephants are fed only Thai Arabica coffee grown at an altitude of 1500 m. In addition, elephants need to eat about 32 kg of coffee fruits to produce 1 kg of coffee beans.
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Surprisingly, Vietnam is the second largest coffee producer in the world. The first, of course, is Brazil: the unchanging homeland of both coffee and TV shows. Now Vietnam produces about 18% of all coffee in the world. And it all started, of course, with the French, who in 1857 first brought coffee beans to the territory of their colony.
In addition to the fact that there is a lot of coffee here, it is roasted in unusual ways (for example, with sweet syrups), thanks to which it acquires a unique sweet chocolate taste. And they serve coffee in any cafe: thick and fragrant, with ice and a glass of delicious green tea in addition. Coffee is the best.
Typical Vietnamese coffee shop: 12,000 dong ($0.5) per cup of coffee, free iced green tea
Ice coffee with condensed milk: an unforgettable taste!
There are two types of grains in Vietnam: robusta and arabica. Robusta is much more popular, you can often find blends based on robusta with a little addition of arabica. In Nha Trang, you can find many shops on the street where the coffee beans you choose will be ground right in front of you and sealed in a bag - in my opinion, a great gift for family and friends!
There are a great many such stores: choose grains (you can mix varieties in any proportions), and they are ground and sealed right in front of you
The most popular brand of coffee in Vietnam can be called Me Trang (read Mechang). Shops of this company are found in tourist Nha Trang on every corner. Mechang coffee is really tasty, but we didn’t notice much difference compared to little-known brands of coffee with.
The most famous coffee brand in Vietnam today is Me Trang
In addition to Robusta and Arabica coffee, such a variety of coffee as Luwak (or Luwak) is found everywhere in Vietnam. These are ordinary coffee beans that have passed through the gastrointestinal tract of one very cute furry animal.
What is this super trendy animal dung luwak coffee in Vietnam? How does it smell, and most importantly, how did people get to this point?
Who is a luwak animal
The official name of this cute babies is musangs or palm martens.
Curious
And infinitely cute
These animals simply adore ripe coffee berries. After they ingest the coffee cherries, the pulp surrounding the coffee beans themselves is digested in their stomach, and the beans are passed out unchanged during a bowel movement (sorry for such details). After that, people collect valuable cargo, wash it and dry it. We hasten to assure you that there is no expected unpleasant odor after these procedures.
Valuable musang excrement before washing
The animal is especially valued for the fact that while in its gastrointestinal tract, coffee beans are fermented in a special way, due to which they lose the inherent bitterness of coffee. And the taste of coffee becomes sour.
Luwak coffee beans after washing
Right on the farm they can fry it
Luwak coffee beans after roasting
There is a legend about how people first learned the unique properties of luwak coffee. A misfortune happened in one poor family: wild masangs (or tsivengs) ate the entire crop of ripe coffee beans for sale. The family was very sad, but then they noticed the excrement of animals, and in them - undigested grains. Out of desperation, these grains were washed, roasted and passed off as ordinary coffee. What was their surprise when the taste of it turned out to be simply delicious!
Today, the production of luwak coffee is a complex and expensive process. Wild animals are caught and settled on the farm. They produce a special enzyme only 6 months of the year, so the rest of the time they are fed ordinary food, usually vegetables and fruits. When the time comes, all other food from their diet is removed and fed exclusively with coffee fruits. Since it is quite expensive to feed the animals, often they are simply caught in the right season, and after the production of coffee they are released to be caught the following year. In addition, breeding them on a farm will not work: these animals do not breed in captivity.
We saw luwak coffee farms in Vietnam and Bali, and it was a pity for the animals everywhere: such living machines operated by man.
Close animal mink on the farm
By the way, we heard that they began to produce coffee from the excrement of an elephant and even birds. The process is approximately the same as with musangs, but the volumes, of course, are many times greater. We have not seen such coffee in Vietnam, but they say that it is as tasty as luwak. If so, maybe soon furry animals will stop being tortured on farms? After all, one elephant can produce 100 times more delicious coffee than a small rodent.
How to brew luwak coffee
Like ordinary coffee, luwak in Europe or Asia is often brewed in Turks (this method is called "oriental").
In Vietnam, they prefer a different method: small metal cups with a sieve and a press, where coffee is poured with hot water, and it is infused, dripping into a glass drop by drop. We liked this method, we bought ourselves such devices and now we always carry them with us.
How much is vietnamese luwak coffee
Today in Asia, many packs are sold with the image of the musang animal (the one that produces expensive grains) on the package. The cost of such packs starts from $ 2 per 500 gr. But we hasten to assure you that real luwak grains in such packs are no more than 1-5%, and maybe not at all. Often, under the guise of luwak coffee, artificially fermented coffee is sold in packs, which has nothing to do with cute animals.
Usually, luwak coffee is mixed with robusta and sold. The more luwak grains in a pack, the more expensive it will be. The price of pure kopi-luwak coffee in beans in Vietnam is about $ 1000 . And the cost of 1 cup of luwak coffee in Europe can reach $ 90 !
The price of luwak coffee in Russia today reaches 3700 rubles per 100 gr. or 24 "800 per 1 kg. We quote these prices from a specialized site that sells this particular type of coffee in Russia luwak.rf.
Video about real Luwak coffee from Indonesia:
We bought such packs in Vietnam and for only $ 2, most likely they do not contain real luwak coffee beans, but the coffee is unrealistically delicious:
There is a rather rude expression in Russian that says that you can’t make candy out of shit.
Today I will tell you about one of the most memorable places in Thailand, where they show how elephant waste is made in Thailand ... well, if not sweets, then at least very cute and interesting things.
In the North of Thailand, near one of the largest tourist centers in the country, the city of Chiang Mai, there is an open-air museum that shows the entire process of making paper from elephant waste. The company is called Poopoopaper, which in translation means paper from, sorry, poop. But wait, turn up your nose, in fact, everything is very interesting there and not at all disgusting.
In fact, the basis of any paper is cellulose, that is, plant fibers. Because the elephant's diet is plant-based and contains a very high percentage of fiber, it occurred to someone to use elephant dung to make paper. Whether it was a necessity, or just a good marketing move, one can only guess, but the result turned out to be very interesting and this company successfully exists both in Thailand itself and beyond.
So, how does the process of turning elephant dung into works of art take place?
First, elephant cakes are dried in the sun.
By the way, in this form they absolutely do not smell and do not get dirty.
Then they are boiled. During the cooking process, all non-fibrous substances are separated - pebbles, dirt, leaves, etc. And in 4-6 hours of cooking, the fiber turns into a homogeneous mushy substance. Cooking takes place at a temperature of 90-100 degrees to kill all possible bacteria.
No chemicals are used, only water. The water left after brewing can be reused for brewing the next batch, or used to water and fertilize the garden.
For the manufacture of paper itself, the same method is used that was used in the homeland of paper in China.
The fiber slurry is distributed on a special mesh and left to dry under the sun.
After the paper dries, it is ready to use.
At this stage, two options are possible - manual production and using technology. When distributing the paper gruel over the surface of the grid manually, the final version is quite uneven with a bumpy surface. But if you increase the cooking time, grind the resulting slurry with a blender and distribute it on screens on an industrial line, you will get a much smoother and more familiar paper.
Poopoopaper are very proud of the sustainability of their production and absolute environmental friendliness. At all the stands that tell about the stages of paper creation, the emphasis is on this. In addition to the processes of paper production from the waste of elephants, it tells about the history of the emergence and production of paper in general.
You can freely move around the territory and touch any exhibits you like, no one limits your freedom.
At the end of the exposition, for an additional small fee, you will be offered to make a souvenir with your own hands and according to your own design.
You can make a frame for a photo or a notebook, decorate it with ready-made figures, or cut something as you wish.
It should be especially interesting for children, at least these applications vividly reminded me of crafts in kindergarten.
And if you are not drawn to creative experiments, here in the store there is a huge selection of ready-made souvenirs - notebooks, notebooks, beads and earrings, postcards, etc.
The museum is not large, if you wish, you can walk around it all in 10-15 minutes, but it is very interesting, so you will be in Chiang Mai - I highly recommend it!
I think you can guess that we are not talking about Napoleon, but still about the elephant. And what he does on the field, about the processes of his nutrition and digestion, as well as about the excretory system, everyone also guesses.
Thailand and elephants surprise and delight the world again.
It turns out that elephants can not only help a person in hard work, entertain people with tracks through the jungle, play polo and football, even draw, compete in running and throwing darts, and act out scenes of ancient battles.
What else are elephants useful for? Many tourists know that you can buy paper, various albums and notebooks made from elephant dung as a souvenir.
It is difficult to say now who first came up with the idea of making paper from poop.
However, one story about India, I think, is worth telling.
One Indian businessman, while walking down the road to a temple near Amber Palace in Jaipur, tells The Los Angeles Times, looked at a pile of elephant dung he had just stepped into and noticed that the texture of herbivore droppings was very similar to wood.
Eureka! he thought. Elephant poop paper.
At the time, Wijender Shekhawat was 29 years old, making handmade paper from cotton and barely making ends meet.
His family thought something else: "Complete fool."
The Shekhawat dynasty came from the warrior caste. Yes, of course, the family has fallen a little into decline, but what will the neighbors think?
According to Shekhawat's mother, their ancestors once sat on the throne and the only thought
which came to their mind about the son's idea:
"How low we have fallen!"
The main buyer of Shekhawat was also skeptical.
"This is too weird," thought Mahima Mehra, director of paper production at Papeterie Co.
“It's just ridiculous.” But Shekhawat persisted in experimenting.
Paper made from 100% manure fell apart, 50% manure and 50% cotton was too brittle.
And finally, after many months, he found the right combination: 75% manure - 25% cotton.
Don't worry, the manure is washed first.
By that time, Mehra also supported the idea after doing market research.
It turned out that similar paper is already being made in Thailand, Sri Lanka, South Africa and other places.
To combat the cynics, they referred to Ganesha - the elephant-headed Hindu deity - saying that there could be no harm in the recycled waste of the divine.
"In our country, religion is everything. Suddenly, many people wanted to work with this paper," says Mehra.
At first, there were difficulties with the collection of raw materials, but Shekhawat solved this problem by taking on the feeding of numerous elephants, which are used by mahouts to walk tourists in Jaipur. The quality of raw materials improved and everyone, including the drivers, was satisfied.
Initial attempts to outsource marketing to a German company failed.
The Germans were too serious for such a product.
"You can't be boring, you have to be funny with stuff like that," Mehra said.
And they decided to sell it themselves.
"Made from India's finest elephant dung" says Haathi Chaap branded paper.
(elephant print).
According to Mehra, some customers say "Ow!" and refuse to touch it
but most are smiling and hardly think about the smell.
"Once we explain how it's done, they absolutely love the idea."
The smell is really indistinguishable, according to a journalist from The Los Angeles Times.
First, the manure is washed, then brought to a boil, adding salt and baking soda to moderate the smell.
This mass is beaten off, sifted, rolled into sheets. The final stage - drying, takes from one day to a week in the rainy season.
For a while, Shekhawat experimented: he tried to feed turmeric to elephants in the hope of creating yellow paper.
Did not work out.
Now he adds organic dyes at the end of the process, including beetroot juice for red paper, dried pomegranate skin for gray paper, and castor oil for green paper.
Shekhavat's enterprise has existed for 8 years. He now produces 2,000 2' x 3' sheets weekly, which he sells to the United States and Europe.
Shekhawat has always been inclined towards charity. “As a child, he gave his lunch to beggars,” says his mother, “
Now he dreams of relocating his workshop to the countryside to provide jobs for women who have little chance of leaving home, and to become an example for entrepreneurs."
"Call it God's providence or luck, but things have fallen into place and I feel blessed," says the successful businessman.
"They used to think I was stupid, now they think I'm a genius."
Canadian entrepreneur Michael Flankman was also thought crazy by his partners when he brought back from Thailand the idea of making paper products from elephant droppings in 2002.
Today, Michael and his wife Tang's company, The Great Elephant Poo Poo Paper Company, produces albums, notebooks, notebooks, photo frames, wrapping paper, bags and postcards.
In addition to elephant poop, Elephant Poo uses horse and cow droppings, as well as panda excrement.
Products that do not harm health and the environment are an inspiration for a married couple.
They believe they have struck a balance between environmental responsibility and commercial value, an approach that our planet so badly needs today.
Michael and Tan Flankman also find it incredibly fun to sell poop for everyday life.
In their opinion, one should not take oneself too seriously.
Thais, as always, treat everything with humor.
And I'm with him, and with great love for big animals.
The technological process of paper production in the same Thailand goes something like this.
The most unpleasant stage of the entire production can be identified as the very first. It lies in the fact that the entire mass must be thoroughly washed. By the way, at this stage, you can determine whether the animal is sick. Judged by the smell of the washed product. An unpleasant smell is the first sign of diseases of the gastric-intestinal system. If the animal is healthy, the smell will not irritate the specialist's sense of smell.
The second stage is a little more pleasant than the first, because the smell still remains in the resulting substance, especially since the boiling process takes place at a high temperature of the broth. It is at this stage that the bacteria die. The boiling time is calculated depending on what the elephant ate. If it was bananas and grass, 3 hours would be enough. After sugarcane and bamboo, you need at least 5 hours. The liquid obtained during the processing goes to the fields as fertilizer.
Further processing consists in adding hydrogen peroxide with soda silicate to the resulting mass. This is necessary in order to destroy the remaining bacteria, and give the mass a white color. After 30 minutes, the product acquires a straw color.
The next step in creating a unique paper is grinding and selecting fibers by size. The machine, for passing this mass, works on the principle of selecting the smallest fibers. To soften the resulting fibers, a soap solution is used. At the exit we get a liquid light mass.
After all the necessary preparations of the solution, the scales come into play. We need koloboks of 300 grams each. This division is usually done by women. Further, these koloboks will be dissolved in water, and molds will be poured. The size of these forms in most cases is an A2 sheet. After leveling the resulting mass in the forms, the future paper is dried. Drying takes place in the sun. After complete drying, a strong paper is obtained.
The last stage of production ends, and the resulting odorless paper with an unusual texture passes into the hands of the artist or designer. Usually, various souvenirs are made from this paper, such as photo albums and photo frames. After all, it is not a shame to present such a paper, unique in many respects, as a gift.
It is said that in Australia similar paper is made from kangaroo dung.
Paper made from kangaroo dung will soon be available to visitors to the Australian island of Tasmania as souvenirs. According to the producers, this is an excellent inexpensive souvenir that can not only please the guests of the island, but suggest to the public a good solution to the environmental situation.
The Australians have already produced a trial batch of paper, but during the production process they suddenly encountered the problem of timely delivery of raw materials, that is, kangaroo waste.
In this regard, the managing director of the paper production company, Joanna Gair, turned to her compatriots through the Advocat newspaper with a request to help collect the required number of kangaroo cakes. According to her, producers will be happy with any excrement: both fresh and dry. Joanna asks to collect kangaroo waste in plastic bags and take it to the Creative Paper pulp and paper mill.
According to experts of the company that introduced the new paper production technology, about 400 sheets of A 4 format can be produced from 25 kilograms of kangaroo manure. Therefore, according to experts, the new technology has every chance of successful development not only in Australia, but throughout the world. There is a real saving of money and improvement of the ecological situation in a particular region.
In fact, enterprising Australians can not be called pioneers. It turns out that in some countries this method of production has already been successfully implemented. For example, in Scandinavia, paper made from moose feces is used with pleasure by many institutions.
But okay, you say, let the paper, let it not smell and beautiful and environmentally friendly, and cheap. And I have a frame with a photo of such paper hanging on my wall. Hangs and does not smell :).
And you and I are quite cheerful people and love elephants, but do any of you love elephants enough to drink ....
“A $1,100 coffee made from… elephant dung?
Previously, Kopi-luwak was considered the most expensive coffee variety, the raw material for which is obtained from the excrement of the Malay palm marten. The price of one kilogram of such coffee beans is about 600 dollars.
Now a new variety of Black Ivory coffee (Black Ivory) produced in Thailand has set a new record. Its price is 1100 dollars per kilogram! For one cup of drink, some coffee lovers are willing to pay up to $ 50.
But the most impressive thing is not the price, but the way the new coffee is produced - it is obtained from ... the excrement of Thai elephants. The principle is the same as with martens - getting into the digestive tract of an animal, coffee beans are exposed to the action of special enzymes that destroy protein. And since it is the proteins in coffee beans that are responsible for bitterness, the coffee "at the exit" is not bitter at all.
Elephants are thought to be more suitable for this specific handling than martens because, unlike the latter, they are herbivores.
To date, only 50 kg of grains of this exclusive drink are on sale. So we can say that this is not only the most expensive, but also the most scarce coffee in the world. "
We had some fun, but now seriously:
Depending on the degree of processing, both smooth and textured paper is obtained, which is used for design work. One of the major companies in this business area, ecoMAXIMUS, processes up to two tons of manure daily.
Such a business is allowed to save tens of square kilometers of forests from destruction, and also prevents air pollution by chemical emissions, which are inevitable during factory production.
In addition, the number of elephants, which used to be mercilessly exterminated both for the extraction of ivory and to save farmlands, suffers much less.
For many farmers, their crops were the only source of income that the elephants caused irreparable damage. Now elephants are making a significant contribution to the recovery of the economy of the settlements that suffered from them. Similar production has already been developed in India, Thailand, African countries and other natural habitats of elephants.
If you want to feed the animals, pay the mahout 20 baht for a small bag of elephant's favorite treat - pieces of the core of tender bamboo shoots and treat the giant.
But many people know that the drovers are not the kindest people, which can hardly be called Thai Buddhists. I doubt they believe in anything other than money, if that's what they do.
They offend these kind and noble animals, sometimes they torture them in order to train them.
The freedom that lives in the head of an elephant interferes with the plans of the mahouts.
Elephants often leave their routes, they, like all living beings, may suddenly want to go to the toilet, chew leaves on trees, just choose a different path, and then sharp objects come into play, traces of which can often be seen on the head, torn ears.
I met an elephant named Pum-Pui, and while communicating with him and walking through the forest, I had to repeatedly stop even the loud cries of such a mahout and his desire to hit the animal.
The driver, in general, was walking along the path. I understand that there is little I can change in this situation, but I urge you all to ensure that no one dares to offend these smart creatures even with you. It's not hard for us, is it?
The Thais have a belief that if you walk under the trunk or belly of an elephant, it will bring good luck.
Try it.
