看得我不想喝COFFEE了......

Buy the gross? Coffee at $300/lb.

The world's most expensive -- and legendary -- java beans are harvested from piles of dung. April 7, 2004: 11:50 AM EDT

JAKARTA (Reuters) - How much would you pay for a cup of liquid cat dung?

Quite a lot, if some highly discerning coffee drinkers are anything to go by.

On the lush, volcanic slopes of the Indonesian archipelago, villagers "harvest" kopi luwak. The beans used for the world's rarest and most expensive coffee have already been munched by cat-like palm civets before they are plucked from the dung to be dried and roasted.

Retailing in North America and Europe for up to $600 per kg, kopi luwak, literally "civet coffee" in Indonesian, is not a brew for the faint hearted.

Less than 500 pounds of it are estimated to be produced a year on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, and war and disease are making it even harder to find.

"I first read about it in 1980, but didn't manage to get my hands on any until 1993," said Michael Beech of Raven's Brew Coffee Inc. Until last year, when supplies began to dry up, it was the main supplier of kopi luwak in the United States.

His clients have ranged from ordinary java junkies to comedy actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame, he said. The firm has a backlog of 300 kopi luwak orders to fill at $75 a quarter pound.

"To be honest, you can't get $75 worth of quality in any coffee. You are really paying for the experience," Beech said.

The brew has become so rare that a newly published book on coffee in Indonesia, "A Cup of Java," relegates it to legend.

"We have failed to find any coffee-seller who admits to actually selling kopi luwak from the feces of the civet cat," write authors Gabriella Teggia and Mark Hanusz.

To many Indonesians, the term kopi luwak has come to mean simply the beans which the civet -- a notoriously fussy eater which selects only the ripest coffee cherries -- would choose.

"We just use the name for branding, but we don't trade in it," says Jeffrey Susanto, whose family runs the Kopi Luwak string of gourmet coffee shops in Jakarta.

Guerillas, cats and elephants
The rarity of kopi luwak is confirmed by Nugroho Bintang Satrio, the Central Java chief of the Indonesian Coffee Exporters Association.

"Only a tiny portion of small-holders are left who collect it," he said, adding that traders buy it at about $1.30 per kilo, about twice the price of ordinary robusta.

In the last year, a government offensive against rebels in rugged Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra has also cut into supply. "Farmers get killed if they harvest the coffee too far into the bush," one trader said.

Then there is the bad press caused by the deadly flu-like SARS virus. Civets, which are not cats but are related to mongooses, have been slaughtered in their thousands in China and imports banned from many Western countries for fear they carry SARS.

"Even if SARS was associated with the coffee itself, by the time it's collected and washed there is a very long period that has elapsed," says Massimo Marcone, a food scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who has carried out extensive tests on kopi luwak and deemed it safe.

Yet despite all that, some still harbor doubts.

"Sumatra, in the popular imagination anyway, is just too close to China and I'm just wary of the whole SARS thing," says Beech, adding that Raven's Brew may cease to offer kopi luwak.

"We are working on an elephant poop coffee," he says with a chuckle, explaining a plan he vows is serious. The plan is to feed coffee to tuskers at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka and sell the product, farming the proceeds back into the orphanage.

"It will be a do-gooder coffee, pooped out by bonafide orphan elephants," Beech explains.

Plus, it doesn't taste so good
According to some experts, a bean that has been partly digested tastes special.

"What I did find with kopi luwak was that the acids, the gastric juices and the enzymes were actually getting inside the bean and breaking down the proteins," Marcone said.

"You start getting amino acids. When these things are heated during roasting, they react with other components and they create certain flavor compounds different from other beans."


So what does the world's most pricey coffee taste like? Coffee buffs say it depends on whether the civet has been eating arabica or robusta beans.

"Initially people thought it must be the best coffee in the world, but I have to be honest about it, it's a crappy cup of coffee," Beech said of the robusta variety.

No matter how exotic the processing, it is mostly robusta cherries the luwak munches. That fact is a legacy of the coffee blight which in 1878 destroyed every low-lying arabica plant from Ceylon to Timor, allowing Brazil and Colombia to take the lead as the world's main suppliers of arabica.

Weeks of phone calls around Indonesia results in a fragrant mailbox containing a brown envelope from an East Java coffee trader. Inside is 250 grams of brown gold -- kopi luwak arabica.

The aroma is rich and strong and the beans oily. Ground and steeped in boiling water the flavor is, well, much like any other coffee. But the experience lingers in the memory.

Find this article at:
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/07/news/funny/civet_coffee.reut/index.htm

[此贴子已经被作者于2004-4-7 20:44:26编辑过]

哈哈~ it is so funny, but it is true story la. Dung are good for plants... woo, good I don't drink coffee.

Betting it all on a single spin

April 8, 2004: 9:12 AM EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A British man who has sold all his possessions, including his clothes, will stand in a rented tuxedo on Sunday and bet everything on a single spin of the roulette wheel.

If he wins, he doubles his money. If he loses, he will be left with only the television crew documenting his every move.

Ashley Revell, a 32-year-old Londoner, said he was worth about £75,000 ($138,000) after he sold everything in March.

"I thought I was worth at least £100,000," he said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas, where he is putting in a week gambling about $3,000 in a bid to raise his pot.

By Wednesday, he was down $1,000.

Revell said he had planned to have a friend videotape his bet-it-all spin, but Britain's Sky One television decided it was worth a short reality series, called "Double or Nothing."

Sky will not pay him, he says, but a crew has followed his preparation and will cover the spin live on Sunday at the Hard Rock casino in Las Vegas. It also plans to follow him for a month afterward, win or lose.

Revell, recently a professional gambler, said he decided to take a big plunge while he was still young and raised the stakes as high as possible, including selling his clothes.

"I like to do things properly," he said. ()

He had not decided yet whether to place his money or red or black on Sunday afternoon.

"I don't know man," he said. "One of them is going to be the right thing to say and one is going to be the wrong thing."

He added that if he won he would probably take his winnings rather than spin again.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Find this article at:
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/08/news/funny/roulette.reut/index.htm

i saw this stupid news too. Crazy people is everywhere. Someone from my company is going to Las Vegas to watch a boxing game on weekend, he is also going to watch the single spin live.

Revitalizing Drinks Are Also Pepping Up SalesBy SHERRI DAY

Published: April 4, 2004


VODKA mixers. Hangover remedies. Serious jolts of caffeine. However they are used, so-called energy drinks have quickly become the elixirs of choice for teenagers and young adults too hip for espressos, colas and fancy teas.

The drinks - which consist mostly of sugar, water and caffeine, but also a variety of vitamins, herbs and supposedly energy-enhancing extracts - have overtaken bottled water as the fastest-growing segment of the beverage industry. Beverage companies are rushing into this $1 billion market to grab share from Red Bull, the pioneer in the field, whose drinks went on sale in the United States seven years ago. And they need no other lure than young consumers' willingness to buy 8-ounce cans of energy drinks for at least two times the cost of a 12-ounce cola. By some volume measures, the multiple is even higher. "In convenience stores, a case of Red Bull sells for about six times the amount of a case of Coke or Pepsi," said John D. Sicher, the editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, a trade publication. "The margins are somewhere between excellent and obscene."

In the last three years, hundreds of energy drinks have flooded store shelves, bearing names that range from the exotic, like Piranha (from EAS International, a nutrition and supplements company), to the morally questionable, like Pimp Juice (from Fillmore Street Brewery in Overland, Mo.). Though Red Bull, an Austrian company, controls about 50 percent of the United States market, its share shrank by 3.7 percentage points in the year ending last April, according to Beverage Digest.

"They need to step on it," said Tom Pirko, the president of Bevmark, a beverage industry consulting firm in Santa Barbara, Calif. "I would spend a lot more money fast, and it's a good investment." Executives at Red Bull said their chief executive, Dietrich Mateschitz, was unavailable for an interview until autumn. In a statement, the company said that it had no plans for drastic changes.

"The strategy of Red Bull has not changed in any significant respect in 15 years, and certainly not due to the launch of well over a hundred me-too products, most of which have already disappeared from the market again," it said. "Losing relative shares in a more competitive, dynamically expanding market while increasing absolute volume is a perfectly natural process."

The company says its worldwide sales rose 10 percent last year, and it claims that it still has a global market share of 70 to 90 percent.

Red Bull sells only two products - its original energy drink and a sugar-free version, introduced last year. It uses a minimum of national television advertising, focusing its marketing on sponsorships of extreme-sports events and athletes, and lobbying bars, clubs and other retail outlets to sell its products.

WHAT has made Red Bull and other energy drinks so popular among their target market -18- to 25-year-old men - is the drinks' caffeine-enhanced buzz, analysts say. An 8-ounce serving typically has about 80 milligrams of caffeine, about the same as a cup of coffee and more than twice as much as a 12-ounce can of Pepsi or Coke.

In addition, Red Bull is enhanced with the sugar glucuronolactone, which is found in grain and red wine. It also contains taurine, an amino acid that grew into an urban legend as party-goers described it as an energy-enhancing compound extracted from bulls' testicles. Taurine actually occurs naturally in human muscle and is also found in scallops, fish, poultry and infant formula.

Many of the drinks also contain vitamins and herbs like guaraná, ginseng and ginkgo, to which marketers attribute various health and wellness claims. Red Bull, for example, says its drinks improve performance - especially during times of increased strain or stress - bolster concentration, improve reaction speed and stimulate metabolism. Some food experts argue that the additives offer little in the way of tangible benefits.

"Manufacturers cash in on that whole idea of functional foods, of creating different foods and beverages with supposedly special benefits, usually involving health, and then charging extra for them," said David Schardt, a senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. When consumers "pay a lot of money for these energy drinks, they're probably expecting more than what you'd get from a strong cup of coffee," he added.

Federal regulators have been examining energy drinks to ensure that they are labeled properly and meet the claims they make.

Energy drinks, including Red Bull, have been banned by several European countries - including Denmark, Norway, Sweden and France - because of their high levels of caffeine. Marketers say they are not worried about the prospect of government regulation in the United States, because the caffeine levels and herbal supplements they use are found in other unregulated products.

"Now consumers are so savvy about what ginseng and guaraná are, these ingredients aren't as foreign and as strange as they were once seen," said Kristine Hinck, a spokeswoman for PepsiCo's SoBe line of beverages, which includes energy drinks.

In the United States, Red Bull first became popular in Santa Cruz, Calif., health clubs, analysts said. The company focused its early marketing on extreme-sports enthusiasts, who gulped it down in hopes of enhancing their performance. As the company slowly built a nationwide distribution network, Red Bull also became hip in bars and clubs, where young revelers mixed the drink with vodka or used it, they claimed, to accelerate the recovery from hangovers. Analysts attribute the transition from health clubs to bars to aggressive marketing by the company, but Red Bull says consumers themselves demanded the drink.


With bars charging as much as $7 to $8 for an 8-ounce Red Bull that cost $1.99 at the grocery store, competitors began offering to undercut those prices. Red Bull filed lawsuits last year against four clubs and bars, contending that it had caught them substituting cheaper beverages when customers ordered Red Bull. The suits have been settled on undisclosed terms.

THE challenges to Red Bull come from companies big and small. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo entered the market in 2001; Red Bull, Coke's KMX and Pepsi's Amp and SoBe lines accounted for 90 percent of all energy drink sales in 2002, according to Mintel Consumer Intelligence, a market research firm. Anheuser-Busch also jumped into the fray in 2001, with its citrus-flavored 180.

Lately, smaller companies have flooded convenience-store shelves with less expensive products. For example, Rockstar, a company based in Las Vegas, introduced an energy drink in 16-ounce cans in 2001. Its promotes it as "twice the size of Red Bull for the same price."

"I saw that everyone else had basically copied Red Bull with small-size cans," said Russell Weiner, the chief executive of Rockstar. "I said we'll take over. I had such faith. I knew that if I wanted it, other people did, too."

Fuze Beverage also markets its Omega Energy Drink in a 16-ounce version. There are also so-called urban energy drinks, which trade on the celebrity of their namesakes, like Liquid Ice, named after the rapper Ice-T, and Russell Simmons's DefCon 3.

For many of the upstarts, the most difficult challenge is getting their products into supermarkets and convenience stores, where 60 percent of all energy drinks are sold, according to Mintel Consumer Intelligence. Red Bull has built a strong network of independent distributors, and Coke and Pepsi can use their bottling networks to reach customers.

It is across store counters, not bars, that marketers hope to reach their next wave of customers - mothers, harried office workers and the health-conscious.

"We think energy drinks are the new coffee," said Scott Moffitt, the vice president for marketing at SoBe. "It delivers the pick-me-up that coffee does. But it tastes better, and it's better for you. It has a better image, and it's more portable. You can't throw a cup of coffee in your backpack."

偶从来不喝ENERGY DRINK, 大伙儿都喝吗?

find this article at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/business/yourmoney/04drink.html

[此贴子已经被作者于2004-4-9 11:26:18编辑过]

I never drink any energy drinks.. I don't believe them.

i sometmie drink straight up shoots w/ voka, and few other mix drinks, so i can get buz fast, which i dont think it is so bad

ox!! Does your "straight up shoots w/ voka" count as energy drink? man, that is alcohol~~~