Kopi luwak

• 1. Introduction

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  Kopi luwak, also called civet coffee, begins its life inside a small Southeast Asian mammal, the Asian palm civet. The animal eats ripe coffee cherries, and the beans come out the other end. People collect them, clean them, roast them and sell them. At the top of the market, wild-collected beans have fetched as much as 1300 dollars per kilogram. Admirers have nicknamed the result the Holy Grail of coffees. That raises a handful of questions. What actually happens to a bean on its trip through a civet? Does it really taste better, or does the story do all the selling? And what happens to the animals when a rare luxury becomes an industry?

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• 2. Inside the Civet

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  The chemistry begins at the endocarp, the tough layer that surrounds each coffee seed. Digestive enzymes and gastric juices seep through it and attack the storage proteins inside. Those proteins break into shorter peptides, which shifts the mix of amino acids in the bean and changes its aroma. Later, when the beans are roasted, the altered proteins go through the Maillard reaction, the non-enzymatic browning that gives roasted foods much of their character.

  Producers point to a second advantage, which happens before digestion even starts. The civet is thought to pick the ripest and most flawless cherries. Inside the animal, the beans begin to germinate through a process called malting, which is said to reduce bitterness. In the wild, these two effects stand in for two familiar steps in conventional coffee. One is hand-picking only the best fruit. The other is the washed process, which strips away pulp and skin and leaves mostly the seed. Whether that bargain pays off in the cup is a separate matter.

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• 3. Islands of Origin

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  Coffee reached Indonesia through Dutch colonialists, who set up plantations and imported beans from Yemen. In the 19th century, farmers in central Java began brewing and drinking coffee from beans that civets had excreted on their plantations. The practice grew from there, and today kopi luwak is produced mainly on Sumatra, Java, Bali and Sulawesi, as well as in East Timor.

  The Philippines has its own tradition, with a different name in almost every region. In the Cordillera it is kape motit. Tagalog areas say kape alamid, Mindanao says kape melo or kape musang, and the Sulu Archipelago says kahawa kubing. In Palawan's Langogan Valley, collectors gather droppings from both the Asian palm civet and the Palawan binturong, then clean the beans they find on the forest floor. Production has since spread further, to Thailand, Vietnam and Ethiopia.

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• 4. A Question of Taste

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  Inside the coffee industry, many people treat kopi luwak as a gimmick. The Specialty Coffee Association of America reports a general consensus within the industry that, in its words, "it just tastes bad". One coffee professional ran a rigorous cupping of the same beans, with and without the civet process. His verdict was that "It was apparent that luwak coffee sold for the story, not superior quality." On the association's scale, the luwak scored two points below the lowest of three other coffees. He found that the process dulled good acidity and flavor while adding a smoothness to the body, which many drinkers read as a plus.

  Trained tasters could pick out the civet coffee, but they called it thin. A food writer reviewing coffee sold to American shoppers was blunter. Her verdict was that it tasted like Folgers, and she described it as petrified dinosaur droppings steeped in bathtub water. She could not finish it.

  The laboratory tells a slightly different story. A comparative chemical study of Robusta beans found that civet-processed ones held significantly more total fat. They also carried higher levels of two methyl esters, caprylic and capric, which are used as flavouring agents and linked to creamy, dairy-like notes. Taste also depends on the animal itself, since its diet, health and stress levels may all change what ends up in the bean.

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• 5. Battery Cages

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  Chris Shepherd, a deputy regional director of TRAFFIC in Southeast Asia, compared civet farms to battery chicken operations. His words were: "The conditions are awful, much like battery chickens." He described animals taken from the wild, kept in very small cages on a poor diet and separated from companions they try to stay close to. He warned of a high mortality rate and a real conservation risk for some civet species, adding that it was "spiraling out of control".

  The shift came as international demand grew. Collecting droppings from wild animals gave way to intensive farms, where civets are force-fed cherries to boost yields. Such farms in Southeast Asia now confine tens of thousands of animals.

  In 2013, investigators from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals found wild-caught civets on farms in Indonesia and the Philippines. The animals lacked exercise, a proper diet and space. Video footage showed repeated pacing, circling and biting at cage bars, and many animals had lost their fur. A BBC investigation found similar conditions. Farmers in north Sumatra confirmed that their beans went to exporters supplying Europe and Asia.

  The most striking reversal came from Tony Wild, the coffee executive who brought kopi luwak to the Western world. He now opposes it over animal cruelty and has launched a campaign called "Cut the Crap".

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• 6. Price and Fraud

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  In 2010, kopi luwak sold for between 100 and 500 dollars per pound. The people at the start of the chain saw little of that. Collectors in the Philippines were paid closer to 20 dollars per kilogram. A specialty Vietnamese weasel coffee, made from beans eaten by wild civets, was priced at 500 dollars per kilogram. Most buyers were Asian, especially from Japan, China and South Korea. Some specialty coffee shops sell a single brewed cup for anywhere from 35 to 80 dollars.

  With margins like that, honesty is hard to guarantee. Investigations by PETA and the BBC found fraud to be rife, with producers willing to stamp a wild-sourced label on coffee from caged civets. Genuine wild kopi luwak is hard to buy even in Indonesia, and proving that a bag is real is harder still. Enforcement of the name is thin.

  There is even a cheap local brand called Luwak that costs under three dollars per kilogram. It is occasionally sold online as if it were the real thing.

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• 7. Imitations and Cousins

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  Researchers at the University of Florida were issued a patent for a process that mimics the civet's digestion without the animal. A Brooklyn food startup, Afineur, developed its own patented fermentation technology. It reproduces some of kopi luwak's taste while also aiming to improve the bean's flavor and nutritional profile. Vietnamese companies sell an imitation made with an enzyme soak, which they say replicates what happens in the civet's gut. Another approach is to seed beans with the same microbes found in the civet gut, which skips the excrement entirely.

  Several pressures drive these efforts. The high price invites anyone who can make the coffee in volume. Production is labor-intensive whether the beans come from farms or the wild, and quantities are small. Imitation may also be a response to the declining civet population.

  Nature has its own variants. The binturong is sometimes kept captive for the same purpose. Reports describe a similar process happening naturally with muntjac and birds. Bat coffee is in demand too, made from seeds that bats spit out after feeding on the ripest fruit. Once dried and processed, those seeds yield a coffee with a slight fruity flavor.

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• 8. On Screen and Page

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  In the film The Bucket List, the billionaire health care magnate Edward Cole, played by Jack Nicholson, carries kopi luwak on all his travels. He has no idea how it is made. His companion Carter Chambers, played by Morgan Freeman, explains that the beans pass through a civet and that its gastric juices give the coffee its distinctive aroma.

  The Japanese manga series Beastars goes further and gives the idea a character. Deshico is an anthropomorphic civet who produces kopi luwak herself.

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