What Are Civet Coffee Beans and Why Do They Cost So Much?

Kopi Luwak, known as civet coffee, retails from at least 600 dollars per pound because production is very limited. The beans come from Indonesian Sumatra, where civets eat coffee cherries and the seeds pass through digestion. The article traces the drink's colonial-era origins, the debate over wild versus caged animals, and certification problems buyers face.

Front Street Coffee reports a distinct herbal aroma and a full body in the cups it tasted, and shares a tested brewing scheme and flavor notes. Because most expensive coffee of this kind can come from caged civets, the article urges drinkers to weigh the wild-sourcing question and certification limits alongside the flavor before paying a premium price for civet coffee.

Kopi Luwak is known as the luxury item of the coffee world, with a retail price starting at at least six hundred dollars per pound, and its scarcity has made it an object of pursuit among the wealthy. But controversy surrounding this coffee has never ceased: do the beans actually come from wild civets or caged individuals? Is the flavor truly as outstanding as legend says? How did European colonial history give rise to this way of drinking coffee found in feces? This article systematically sorts out the past and present of Indonesian Sumatra Kopi Luwak, from historical origins, animal habits, and certification dilemmas to brewing parameters, and shares Front Street Coffee's tested brewing scheme and flavor evaluation, helping coffee lovers view this expensive beverage rationally.

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Most friends who often drink coffee have probably heard that Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is a top-grade coffee, but if asked which coffee is the most expensive in the world, the answer may not be clear to everyone. That title belongs to Kopi Luwak, also known as Indonesian civet coffee. Because production is extremely limited, its retail price starts at at least six hundred dollars per pound, and many call it the Rolls-Royce of the coffee world.

The annual output of Kopi Luwak is not large, and its scarcity makes it highly favored among the wealthy. When Front Street first encountered this coffee, it sensed a unique herbal aroma, and its body was quite excellent.

Historical Origins — The Greed of Colonizers and the Accidental Discovery of Farmers

From a historical perspective, why would anyone look for coffee in excrement to drink? This sounds puzzling, but after checking historical records, clues can be found for both the reason and the discoverers.

In the Age of Discovery, European powers competed to seize land around the world. Taiwan was also once ruled by the Dutch and the Spanish, and Indonesia, the homeland of the civet, likewise fell into Dutch hands. They even established an extremely powerful institution — the East India Company.

Under armed coercion, Indonesian farmers were reduced to cheap labor for the Dutch, growing spices in the early period and switching to coffee in the middle and late periods. Crops produced in tropical Indonesia sold extremely well in Europe, so the Dutch profited greatly. In that era, which colonial country did not treat local people this way? Many European countries used this to build their foundations, and today people may only remember that their ancestors once wielded power across the world.

But farmers never got to taste the coffee they had grown with their own hands, and this problem still exists today. At the time, farmers did not dare to pick crops privately; once discovered, they would be severely punished, but curiosity was ultimately hard to suppress. Someone noticed that coffee beans remained in civet feces, and after processing and trying them, found the taste excellent, and seemed to understand why the Western world was so obsessed with coffee — even what was picked from animal feces tasted this good.

The good times did not last. After the Dutch learned of this, collecting civet coffee also became a new form of forced labor, and that special taste naturally no longer fell to the farmers.

The Bean Source Debate: Wild or Farmed?

In the end, all of this is just to satisfy a luxury product, and one of questionable grade at that. Some experts point out that the uniqueness of civet coffee lies in the fact that wild civets carefully select coffee cherries; once they are locked in cages and casually fed coffee cherries, the quality of the resulting product can be imagined.

Another coffee expert put it even more directly in an article for the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA): civet coffee was not that good to begin with. The civet's digestive process can indeed make coffee smoother, but at the same time it also erases high-quality acidity and flavor — and these are precisely the soul of specialty coffee.

At present, there is no way to distinguish whether civet coffee beans come from wild or captive individuals. BBC conducted a secret investigation in 2013 and found that some coffee in the European market advertised as wild civet came from caged civets subjected to inhumane treatment.

Even Tony Wild, the trader who introduced civet coffee to the West, wrote in The Guardian that this coffee should not be drunk. He believes that the production of civet coffee is becoming increasingly industrialized, animal abuse is becoming more serious, and counterfeit goods are endless. At present, there is no certification mechanism that can prove that so-called "wild" coffee really comes from a wild environment; and although other coffee certification bodies ensure that cultivation and production are credible, they all refuse to endorse civet coffee.

The New York-based Rainforest Alliance and other well-known certification bodies issue certification marks according to the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) standards; these standards prohibit 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 it likewise prohibits farms from keeping wild animals in cages and refuses to certify civet coffee.

Alex Morgan of the Rainforest Alliance said that certifying civet coffee is too risky because it is simply impossible to ensure that the beans are one hundred percent wild. His personal advice is to avoid this kind of coffee as much as possible, because it usually comes from caged animals.

Indonesian Sumatra Kopi Luwak Specialty Coffee

Among the many kinds of civet coffee, the most expensive is Indonesian wild raw beans, followed by the Philippines, while Vietnam's is relatively cheap. There are also so-called "A-grade" civet coffees on the market, whose beans are excreted by artificially fed civets, and may even come from other animals. Wild civets live in a natural environment and can freely choose beans. These civets are very picky: they do not eat bad ones and only choose just-ripened fruit, avoiding old fruit, so the coffee beans they select are necessarily of superior quality and free of defects; fed civets offer no such guarantee, and the beans they excrete vary in quality. Coffee beans must be evaluated by experts and international buyers through cupping for aroma and body, and ordinary consumers find it very difficult to judge the true quality of coffee simply by looking at the packaging.

The principle is actually not complicated: it uses lactic acid bacteria and digestive fluids in the animal's digestive tract to replace machines or washing to remove 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 internally fermented beans. Besides the common civet, animals used in this processing method include guans, monkeys, elephants, and others, but the latter few have not achieved scale, and only the civet stands out.

Civets mainly inhabit tropical rainforests and subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forests at elevations below 2,100 meters, in hilly and mountainous areas, in forest-edge shrublands and grasslands, and prefer rock caves, earthen burrows, or tree holes as resting 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 Solanaceae plants, the seeds of various figs, and fruits such as buzhaguo and sour berries, but civets have poor digestive capacity for plants. Eating berries is equivalent to dessert after a meal; their staple food is meat.

Because of their weak ability to digest plants, and because they are mainly distributed in the broad-leaved forests, shrublands, and agricultural areas of South Asia and Southeast Asia, and these places happen to be suitable for coffee trees to grow, many of the sour berries that civets eat are coffee cherries. Civets can digest only the skin and pulp of the berry; the inner pit, namely the coffee bean, is ultimately excreted.

These coffee beans are generally mainly Robusta, because civets' range of activity is concentrated at low and medium elevations, so most coffee varieties are Robusta. High-altitude Arabica civet coffee is scarce in production. Indonesian low-altitude Robusta coffee originally has an earthy taste and a medicinal flavor, and is also high in body, so this civet coffee has the earthy, musty flavor of aged beans, a body almost close to syrup, and a very special aroma. If you prefer the earthy, musty flavor of Indonesian aged beans or Indian monsoon beans, you may fall in love with this uniquely flavored civet coffee.

How Front Street Coffee Views Kopi Luwak

In recent years, more and more people have begun to boycott civet coffee because of the cruelty behind it. But in fact, civet coffee itself is not wrong; the original production of civet coffee beans was just a very natural phenomenon. In the most natural environment, civets eat the food most suitable for them, select the ripe coffee cherries they choose — ripe fruit, fruit with high sugar content — and then excrete the coffee beans they cannot digest. This is animal instinct, and also a completely natural process.

In the early period, local people picked up the feces of wild civets in the forest, extracted the undigested coffee seeds, and processed them into green beans. Because production was low and the internal fermentation method unique, many merchants later smelled business opportunities and began to capture civets on a large scale for cage farming. Civets, which should have eaten meat, could only eat coffee cherries. But the nutrients in coffee cherries simply cannot maintain a civet's health.

Some people 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 have long eaten only coffee cherries, civets may excrete coffee beans in only one or two hours. The beans stay in the stomach for such a short time that it is not enough to produce the series of changes mentioned above. The bean is still the same bean that was eaten, and even if the flavor changes, it is only minimal.

Front Street Coffee believes that there is no problem with the formation of civet coffee itself. Civets identify ripe coffee cherries by smell, just as Ethiopian red cherries are harvested when fully ripe; the two are different in method but similar in principle. The problem lies with those who lock up civets and force them to eat coffee cherries regardless of whether they are ripe, solely to increase civet coffee production, thus giving rise to these cruel practices. This is no longer within the scope of coffee as we discuss it.

How Front Street Brews Kopi Luwak

■Region: Sumatra, Indonesia

■Variety: timtim, Typica, Catimor

■Processing method: internal fermentation

Front Street 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

Split extraction: use 30 grams of water for a 30-second bloom, pour in a small stream in circles until 125 grams, then split; when the water level is about to expose the coffee bed, continue pouring until 225 grams and stop; when the water level is about to expose the coffee bed again, remove the dripper. (Start timing at the beginning of the bloom.) Extraction time is 2'00".

Kopi Luwak flavor description: herbal, nuts, dark chocolate, fermented notes.

Considering its scarcity and high price, Front Street does not recommend drinking civet coffee. Although genuine civet coffee has a very good flavor, coffees from other producing countries are also excellent.

For those who like floral flavors, Front Street Panama Geisha coffee is recommended; this is one of the most expensive coffees in the world. For those who like fresh coffee with acidity, Front Street Ethiopian Huakui coffee beans are recommended, with notes like black tea and berries. For those who like a balanced nutty and caramel flavor, that is, coffee that is neither sour nor bitter, Front Street Brazil coffee beans are recommended. If you still love the solid, full-bodied taste of Indonesian coffee, it is recommended to buy the highest-grade Front Street Golden Mandheling coffee. After multiple rounds of hand sorting, it can reduce the defect rate of the coffee beans to the lowest, thereby making the coffee aroma clearer and the sweet aftertaste better. All the above coffee beans can be purchased and ordered at Front Street stores and the Front Street Tmall flagship store.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.