Mê Linh Coffee Garden

At Mê Linh Coffee Garden's hillside plot in Tà Nung, the coffee's tasted after passing through a civet first. The farm keeps its own civets — popularly but incorrectly called 'weasels' in Vietnam, a translation mix-up that stuck — feeding them roughly 5 kg of ripe coffee cherries a day and collecting the undigested beans from the droppings the next morning, echoing the process local legend attributes to Vietnamese plantation workers under French colonial rule, who were barred from drinking the coffee they picked and instead recovered beans from civet droppings on the forest floor. The garden sells the result — known in Vietnam as cà phê chồn — across cherry, Arabica and Moka lots, with the Moka grade priced around 400,000 Vietnamese dong per 100 grams, close to $190 a kilogram, reflecting how labor-intensive and limited the output is compared with conventional coffee. Beyond the coffee itself, the site functions as a working farm open to visitors, with terraced valley views over Tà Nung and flower gardens that draw a steady stream of day-trippers as much as coffee buyers, making a stop here as much about watching the process as tasting the cup.