Why is Kopi Luwak the most expensive coffee in the world?
Kopi Luwak is among the most expensive coffees, retailing from at least six hundred dollars per pound. Wild civet coffee from Sumatra, Indonesia is the leading example. The beans are collected from civet droppings after the animal eats and partially digests coffee cherries, and limited annual output keeps prices high. The cup shows a distinct herbal note with a full body.
The practice traces back to the Dutch colonial period, when farmers under the East India Company noticed undigested beans in civet feces and cleaned them for brewing. Today the market raises animal welfare and certification concerns, since caged civets are often used. Where does kopi luwak come from matters for buyers: wild-sourced Sumatra beans differ from farmed versions in both ethics and flavor.
Kopi Luwak is hailed as one of the most expensive coffees in the world, with a retail price of at least six hundred dollars per pound, and the wild civet coffee from Sumatra, Indonesia is the top representative among them. This article will guide you through the historical origins of Kopi Luwak, the controversy over the source of the beans, the specialty attributes of Indonesian Sumatra Kopi Luwak, and Front Street Coffee's views on this special coffee along with brewing parameters. From the discovery by farmers during the Dutch colonial period, to modern animal protection and certification issues, and then to flavor descriptions and brewing methods, we will comprehensively analyze this highly talked-about cup of coffee.
For more specialty coffee knowledge, please follow the WeChat public account: Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee)
Most friends who drink coffee regularly have heard that Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is the top representative in the coffee world, but if asked what the most expensive coffee in the world is, the answer is none other than Kopi Luwak (Indonesian civet coffee). As the saying goes, things are precious when they are rare. The retail price of Kopi Luwak coffee beans starts at least at six hundred dollars per pound, making it a Rolls-Royce-level existence in the coffee circle.
The annual output of Kopi Luwak (also commonly known as cat poop coffee) is quite limited, and precisely because of this, it has become an object of pursuit among the wealthy. When Front Street first tasted Kopi Luwak, it experienced a unique herbal note in its flavor, with quite an outstanding body.
History — The Greed of European Powers and the Accidental Discovery by Farmers
From a historical perspective, why would anyone look for coffee in animal feces to drink? This does sound puzzling, but after checking historical records, the reason and the earliest discoverers can be found.
During the Age of Discovery, European powers expanded their territories around the world, and Taiwan was once colonized by the Dutch and the Spanish. The civet's homeland — Indonesia — was also occupied by the Dutch, who even established what was then called the "East India Company," a government institution that held enormous power.
Under armed coercion, Indonesian farmers were reduced to cheap labor for the Dutch. At first they grew spices, and in the middle and later periods they switched to coffee. Indonesia is located in the tropics, and the crops it produced were widely welcomed in Europe, so the Dutch made huge profits. In the age of navigation, which country did not treat local residents this way? Many European countries laid their foundations at that time, and nowadays later generations may only know that their ancestors once majestically conquered various parts of the world, as if everything had to be led by them...
However, the farmers had never tasted the coffee they planted with their own hands, and this problem still exists today. At that time, farmers did not dare to pick and eat the crops without permission; once discovered, they would be severely punished, but curiosity was ultimately hard to suppress. When someone discovered coffee beans remaining in civet feces and tried them after processing, they found the taste excellent, and they seemed able to understand why the Western world was so obsessed with coffee — even beans picked from animal excrement tasted this good.
The good times did not last long. After the Dutch learned of this, collecting civet coffee also became a new task for the farmers, and that special-tasting coffee could no longer be drunk from then on.
Bean Source: Wild or Farmed?
All of this is merely to satisfy the demand for a luxury product, and moreover a second-rate one. Experts point out that the uniqueness of Kopi Luwak lies in the fact that wild civets carefully select coffee cherries when eating them; but if they are locked in cages and casually fed coffee cherries, the quality of the final product naturally cannot be very good.
In addition, a coffee expert further pointed out in an article for the Specialty Coffee Association of America that Kopi Luwak was not that good to begin with: although the civet's digestive process can indeed make coffee smoother, it also removes high-quality acidity and flavors, which are precisely the core characteristics of specialty coffee.
At present, there is no method that can distinguish whether Kopi Luwak beans come from wild or captive civets. BBC conducted a secret investigation in 2013 and found that some coffees in Europe advertised as wild civet coffee actually came from captive civets subjected to inhumane treatment.
Even Tony Wild, the coffee trader who introduced Kopi Luwak to the West, also stated in an article in the UK's The Guardian that people should not drink Kopi Luwak. He said this coffee has become increasingly industrialized, animal abuse has become more serious, and counterfeit goods are common. Today there is no certification mechanism that can prove that "wild" coffee is truly wild; in addition, although other coffee certification bodies ensure trustworthy coffee cultivation and production, these bodies also refuse to certify Kopi Luwak.
The New York-based Rainforest Alliance and other well-known coffee certification organizations issue certification seals according to the standards of the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN); this set of standards prohibits farms from hunting wild animals, and SAN's regulations for Indonesian coffee also explicitly prohibit caged civets.
UTZ is another important sustainable coffee certification standard, and this standard likewise prohibits farms from keeping wild animals in cages and also refuses to certify Kopi Luwak.
Alex Morgan of the Rainforest Alliance said the risk of certifying Kopi Luwak is too high because there is really no way to ensure that the source of the beans is one hundred percent wild. He said: "My personal advice is to avoid this kind of coffee as much as possible; it usually comes from animals locked in cages."
Indonesian Sumatra Kopi Luwak Specialty Coffee
Among the many kinds of Kopi Luwak, the most expensive is wild raw beans from Indonesia, followed by the Philippines, while Vietnam's is relatively cheaper. There are also so-called "A-grade" cat poop coffees on the market, where the coffee beans are excreted by artificially fed civets, or may even be excreted by other animals. Wild civets live in natural environments and freely choose beans. Because this animal is picky, it does not eat bad ones, and only selects just-ripened fruit rather than old fruit, so the coffee beans it chooses are definitely the highest quality, without defects, while fed civets offer no such guarantee, and the excreted beans vary in quality. Coffee beans are evaluated by experts and international buyers through cupping for aroma and intensity, and it is very difficult for ordinary consumers to judge the true quality of the coffee from the packaging appearance.
Actually, the principle is quite simple: it uses the lactic acid bacteria and digestive fluids of the animal's digestive tract to replace machine or washed processing, removing the pulp and the pectin attached to the surface of the bean pod. These beans are excreted with the feces, and after washing they become precious in-body fermented beans. Besides the commonly heard civet, animals used in this coffee processing method also include the guan, monkeys, elephants, and others, but the latter few have not formed scale, and only the civet stands out alone.
Civets mainly inhabit tropical rainforests, subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest edge shrublands, and grassy areas in hills and mountainous zones below 2,100 meters above sea level, and choose rock caves, earthen holes, or tree holes as habitat sites.
Civets have an omnivorous diet. Animal foods include small mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, crustaceans, and insects, such as rodents, small birds, snakes, frogs, fish, crabs, bird eggs, insects, earthworms, and wild fowl. Plant foods include the stems and leaves of solanaceous plants, the seeds of various figs, and fruits such as lakoocha and sour berries, but civets have poor ability to digest plants, so eating berries is equivalent to their dessert, while their staple food is meat.
Because of their poor ability to digest plants, the main places where they live are distributed in the broad-leaved forests, shrublands, and agricultural areas of South Asia and Southeast Asia, and these areas are also environments suitable for coffee trees to grow, so many of the sour berries that civets eat are coffee cherries, and what civets can digest are only the skin and pulp of the berry. The pit inside the berry, that is, the coffee bean, will ultimately be excreted from the body.
These coffee beans are generally mainly Robusta, because the range of civet activity is at low and medium altitudes, so most of the coffee varieties are Robusta. High-altitude Arabica Kopi Luwak is rare in output. Indonesia's low-altitude Robusta coffee originally had an earthy taste and a Chinese herbal medicine taste, and also high viscosity, so this Kopi Luwak has the earthy smell of aged beans, a body almost close to syrup, and a very special aroma. If you prefer the earthy smell of Indonesian aged beans or Indian monsooned beans, you may fall in love with the flavor of this Kopi Luwak.
How Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) Views Kopi Luwak
In recent years, many people have begun to boycott Kopi Luwak because of the cruelty issue. But the fact is that Kopi Luwak itself is not wrong; the original production of Kopi Luwak beans was just a very natural phenomenon. In the most natural environment, civets eat the most suitable food, eating the coffee cherries they themselves select — ripe fruit, fruit with high sweetness — and then excrete the coffee beans they cannot digest. This is animal nature, and also a very natural occurrence.
In the early days, local people picked up the feces of wild civets in the forest, extracted the undigested coffee seeds, and processed them into green beans. Because of low output and the unique in-body fermentation method, later many merchants seized the business opportunity and began to capture civets in large numbers for cage farming. Civets, which should eat meat, could only eat coffee cherries. But the nutrients in coffee cherries cannot keep civets healthy.
They believe that although the coffee beans are not digested in the civet's digestive tract, the highly corrosive digestive fluids have already corroded their surface. These digestive fluids contain a special protease that can break the coffee bean's original protein chains, decomposing long-chain proteins into small particles and forming short-chain peptides and amino acids.
But in fact, because they consume only coffee cherries for a long time, the coffee beans may be excreted by civets only one or two hours after eating. One or two hours in the civet's stomach is not enough to produce the series of changes mentioned above. The bean is still the same bean as when it was eaten; even if the flavor changes, it is only a tiny, tiny change.
Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) can say that there is no problem with the formation of Kopi Luwak itself. Through its nose, the civet identifies ripe coffee cherries, just as Ethiopian red cherries are also harvested when fully ripe; the two are essentially the same. What is problematic are the people who lock civets up. They force them to eat coffee cherries regardless of whether they are ripe or unripe, simply to increase the production of Kopi Luwak, and thus these cruel things happen. This no longer belongs to the category of coffee we are discussing.
How Front Street Brews Kopi Luwak
■ Region: Sumatra, Indonesia
■ Variety: timtim, Typica, Catimor
■ Processing method: in-body fermentation
Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) Brewing Parameters
Dripper: KONO
Dose: 15 grams
Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:15
Water temperature: 87°C
Grind size: granulated sugar coarseness
Front Street Brewing Method
Staged extraction
Use 30 grams of water for a 30-second bloom, then pour in a small stream in a circular motion until 125 grams for the first stage. When the water level drops and is about to expose the coffee bed, continue pouring until 225 grams and stop. When the water level drops and is about to expose the coffee bed, remove the dripper. (Start timing from the beginning of the bloom.) Extraction time is 2'00"
Kopi Luwak flavor description: herbal, nuts, dark chocolate, fermented note.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
