Kopi Luwak is probably one of the most recurrent topics when talking about coffee. Its fame of best and most expensive coffee in the world seems to beat anything and anyone on this planet. Let's talk about it.
What is Kopi Luwak ?
Kopi Luwak is the Asian palm civet. This famous coffee consists of partially digested coffee cherries, which have been eaten and defecated. The cherries are fermented as they pass through its stomach, and after being defecated with other fecal matter, they are collected. Due to the increased popularity of this method, Asian palm civets are now increasingly caught in the wild and traded for this purpose.
the origins:
Back in the 1600’s the coffee market was very different from today. One of the most prominent sources of coffee was the Dutch East Indies – a group of islands that is today known as Indonesia.
Indonesia was the first country, besides Ethiopia and Yemen, where coffee was grown on a large scale. At one point the Indonesian island of Java became almost synonymous with coffee in Europe.
But by 1830, the Dutch had created a more strict set of rules governing agriculture in the colony. This meant that the native farmers, who were already accustomed to drinking coffee, were suddenly no longer allowed to pick any beans for their own use.
Somehow these caffeine-craving farm workers discovered that a small cat-like animal known as the “Luwak” ate the coffee cherries and passed the seeds without digesting them. It didn’t take long before the workers began collecting, roasting and brewing these defecated beans.
Where is it produced ?
Kopi luwak is produced mainly on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Sulawesi, and in East Timor. It is also widely gathered in the forest or produced in farms in the islands of the Philippines, where the product is called kape motit in the Cordillera region, kapé alamíd in Tagalog areas, kapé melô or kapé musang in Mindanao, and kahawa kubing in the Sulu Archipelago. Weasel coffee is a loose English translation of its Vietnamese name cà phê Chồn.
The raise of Kopi Luwak
In 2007 Kopi Luwak was mentioned in the movie “The Bucket List” featuring “Jack Nicholson” and “Morgan Freeman”.
The interest boomed. Suddenly, a bunch of coffees in South East Asia had a Kopi Luwak stamp on their packaging even though they had never been anywhere near Luwak poop. With a bit of marketing, an average “robusta” bean could be sold at a premium price, to tourists who believed that they had bought the ‘best coffee’ in the world.
The big issue
The boom in popularity made some farmers in poor coffee producing Asian countries suddenly began capturing civets to force feed them the cherries.
The traditional method of collecting feces from wild Asian palm civets has given way to an intensive farming method, in which the palm civets are kept in battery cages and are “force-fed” the cherries. The conditions in which they live are tremendous, poor diet, small cages, continually forced to eat coffee cherries.
Considerations:
It is possible that this combination of carefully selected cherries and efficient processing thanks to the “Luwak” made the coffee superior to anything available back then. However, it’s worth remembering that the general standard of processing wasn’t anywhere close to what we experience today in higher qualities and more professionally advanced industries such as “specialty coffee”.
Kopi Luwak coffee is considered by professionals an average coffee, an inferior product. A lower quality grade and can not be compared to higher quality coffees such as “specialty”.
Certainly drinking a certified ethically produced Kopi Luwak could be a unique experience. However today a large proportion of all coffee sold as Kopi Luwak is fake and not traceable.
Kopi Luwak gained popularity thanks to its particular and unique method, to countless of marketing campaigns and thanks to famous movies appearances rather than for its quality attributes.
I hope you've found this article useful and provided much food for thought.
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