You might have heard of Kopi Luwak or Cat Poop Coffee, an Indonesian coffee made from beans digested and excreted by civet cats.

I love coffee. I mean, I LOVE COFFEE. I would inject it if I could. But…no. No to civet cat poop, for a wide variety of reasons.

But insect poop tea? Well, actually, that sounds pretty interesting.

I noticed this new publication this week:

Xu L., Pan H., Lei Q., Xiao W., Peng Y. & Xiao P. (2013). Insect tea, a wonderful work in the Chinese tea culture, Food Research International, DOI: 10.1016/j.foodres.2013.01.005

Pu-Erh (pronounced ‘poo-air’) is a type of tea that is fermented before drinking. Like wines, these teas grow more valuable with age, and have a rich taste. Poo Poo Pu-Erh (really, not making that up) is a special type of tea from the Yunnan region of China made of droppings from insects eating tea leaves.

蟲屎茶 Translation: Insect Feces Tea

Several different species of insects and plants are used to form a wide array of possible tea tastes. The most commonly used insect seems to be a moth with the charming name of the Tea Tabby. You can see a diagram of the tea making process at right, reproduced from the paper. Basically, you put out a rack of tea leaves, add caterpillars, and then use a sieve (or hand pick!) out the feces.

(As a side note, this is an Elsevier journal, and they have pay-walled this paper so you have to pay $35 to see it. I would have expected at least SOME helpful editing for a paper whose authors’ first language is clearly not English. The species name is even misspelled.)

Note that in this photo and others, the poo looks like pellets. That’s a unique characteristic of caterpillar digestive systems–they wrap their their poo inside a little chitin layer, sort of like a spring roll.

Insect feces tea is priced with a huge range–I’ve seen between $250 and $1000/lb, so it is quite the delicacy. If someone offers you a cup of this tea, it is a high compliment indeed! Drink it!

People pay that price for a tea made out of insect poo because it is supposed to have a wide range of healthful properties. The paper I linked to above did an analysis of what chemicals are in the tea, and it certainly contains lots of antioxidants and a wide array of amino acids. Does it actually make you any healthier? Probably not any more than any other tea, really. But it’s pretty damn interesting.

I have written several times before about how we have all sorts of insects in our regular food supply, but just pretend not to know. There’s nearly always a detectable amount of insect parts in your coffee or chocolate, for example.

Most of the rest of the world (i.e, outside North America and Europe) eats insects on a semi-regular basis. Why do we get squicked so easily by the concept of insects as food, or insect products in our food?

So–would YOU drink it? I would!

I talked to a couple of friends who have tried it, and they say it has a sort of medicinal-chai type of taste.

Also, as a side note: I also learned about another tea with an insect connection, although less direct: