Coffee attracts strangeness. It is farmed in dozens of countries, drunk by billions of people, and studied by scientists who apparently have quite a lot of latitude in choosing what to investigate. The result is a steady supply of stories that sound made up and are not. Here are the ones worth knowing, from the coffee that costs more than a hotel room to the bees that get hooked on caffeine on purpose.
The coffee that passes through an animal first
The most famous is kopi luwak, made from beans eaten and excreted by the Asian palm civet. The digestive process supposedly ferments the beans and mellows the acidity. It became widely known after a mention in the film The Bucket List, and prices climbed accordingly.
The uncomfortable part is what came next. Demand created an industry of caged civets force-fed coffee cherries in conditions that have been repeatedly documented as cruel, and the wild-collected product most buyers imagine is now a small fraction of what is sold. It is one of the clearest cases in coffee of a novelty that became a welfare problem.
Thailand’s Black Ivory Coffee applies the same idea to elephants, and to its credit does it differently: the elephants live at a rescue sanctuary, and the coffee is priced accordingly at around $1,100 per kilogram, appearing on luxury hotel menus at roughly $50 a cup. Whether any of this tastes proportionally better is a separate question, and most specialty roasters would tell you it does not.
Caffeine is a drug plants use on bees
This is my favourite, because it reframes what caffeine is actually for.
A 2013 study published in Science found that honeybees rewarded with caffeinated nectar were three times more likely to remember the associated floral scent than bees given plain sugar water, and the effect held up at both 24 and 72 hours later.
The mechanism is the same one that works on you. Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, which in the bee makes neurons in the mushroom body, the part of its brain that handles learning, more excitable. Coffee and citrus plants produce caffeine in their nectar at concentrations high enough to alter the bee’s behaviour but low enough that it cannot taste it and be put off.
Which suggests something slightly unsettling: caffeine may have evolved in part as a way for plants to manipulate pollinators into returning. The bees are not being paid better. They are being made to remember the address. Every human coffee habit is arguably running on the same trick.
There is a university coffee research centre
What started at UC Davis as an engineering class about building a better brewer has become the UC Davis Coffee Center, a genuine research institution within the College of Engineering with three dedicated facilities and coffee education for undergraduate, graduate and professional students.
The research is not decorative either. Recent work there has covered things like establishing that roasted coffee beans follow a predictable colour curve, which sounds dry until you consider that roast colour is how most of the industry judges a batch. Coffee has quietly acquired the kind of academic infrastructure that wine has had for a century.
People put butter in it, and it caught on
Butter in coffee is not new. It has been drunk for generations in parts of Ethiopia, Tibet and Southeast Asia, sometimes with salt, usually for the calories and warmth.
What was new was the repackaging. Bulletproof coffee, popularised by Dave Asprey in the early 2010s, blends coffee with unsalted grass-fed butter and MCT oil, and arrived attached to a set of claims about focus and fat metabolism. It became a genuine phenomenon, and specialty coffee people were largely unimpressed on flavour grounds: blending fat into coffee flattens the acidity and aromatics that a good coffee is judged on.
As a drink it is fine and quite filling. As a health intervention the claims run well ahead of the evidence, which is a pattern worth noticing whenever coffee is sold as something other than coffee.
You may get something from just smelling it
Researchers at Seoul National University exposed sleep-deprived rats to coffee aroma without letting them drink any, and found changes in the expression of proteins associated with protecting nerve cells from stress damage. Some of those changes overlapped with what you would expect from actually consuming caffeine.
This is a rat study, and the leap to “sniffing coffee replaces drinking it” is not one the research supports. But it does suggest the ritual around coffee, the smell of the grinder, the smell of a café, may be doing a little more than we assume rather than nothing at all.
Paying for a stranger’s coffee became a movement
The suspended coffee, caffè sospeso, is a Neapolitan tradition where you pay for two and drink one, leaving the second for whoever needs it. It spread internationally in the 2010s and now turns up in cafés across Europe, North America and Australia.
There is a decent psychological case for why it sticks. Research on spending consistently finds that money spent on other people produces more happiness than money spent on yourself, and a suspended coffee is about the smallest possible version of that transaction. We have a fuller piece on how suspended coffee works if you want the history.
The hot coffee lawsuit everyone remembers wrong
The McDonald’s case is probably the most misremembered legal story of the last fifty years. It is usually told as a woman spilling coffee on herself and winning millions for her own clumsiness.
What actually happened is that Stella Liebeck, aged 79, suffered third-degree burns requiring skin grafts, that McDonald’s had been serving coffee at a temperature well above what other restaurants used, and that the company had received hundreds of prior burn complaints without changing the policy. She initially asked only for her medical costs. Our full account of the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit covers how the story got so thoroughly inverted.
A Dunkin’ clerk repelled a robbery with the coffee itself
A would-be robber at a Connecticut Dunkin’ Donuts ordered a coffee, tried to pay with a $100 bill, and then attempted to climb through the drive-through window. The clerk threw the coffee she had just poured him at him, followed it with the contents of the pot, and he retreated to his truck and drove off. She closed the window and called the police. The whole thing took about twenty seconds.
It is a small story and a perfect one, mostly because the weapon was the product.
Why coffee generates so much of this
There is a reason these stories keep coming. Coffee sits at an unusual intersection: an agricultural commodity, a chemical stimulant, a daily ritual, a luxury good, and a social space, all at once. Almost any human oddity that can attach itself to a thing has something to attach to here.
Which is also why the weirdness is worth paying attention to rather than dismissing. The bee study changes how you think about what caffeine is for. The civet trade shows what happens when novelty meets demand. The lawsuit is a lesson in how confidently people repeat things that are not true. The coffee is rarely just coffee.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most expensive coffee in the world?
Black Ivory Coffee from Thailand, made from beans digested by elephants at a rescue sanctuary, has held the title at roughly $1,100 per kilogram, served at around $50 a cup in luxury hotels. Kopi luwak, produced via civets, is the better-known and generally cheaper animal-processed coffee.
Is kopi luwak ethical?
Frequently not. Demand created an industry of caged civets force-fed coffee cherries, and welfare problems have been repeatedly documented. Genuinely wild-collected kopi luwak exists but is a small share of what is sold, and it is difficult for a buyer to verify. Most specialty roasters avoid the category entirely.
Do bees really like caffeine?
They respond to it. A 2013 study in Science found honeybees fed caffeinated nectar remembered the location of that reward significantly better than bees fed plain nectar. Caffeine occurs naturally in coffee and citrus nectar at levels bees cannot taste, which suggests plants may be using it to improve pollinator return rates.
Is butter coffee actually good for you?
It is a high-calorie drink that many people find filling, and the tradition of adding fat to coffee is genuinely old. The specific health claims attached to the modern Bulletproof version run well ahead of the evidence supporting them. Treat it as a breakfast substitute rather than a supplement.
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