Skip to main content

Kopi Luwak coffee

Image result for civet cat
Coffee beans most recently produced by the civet cat.  (Image courtesy of The Guardian)




The most expensive coffee in the world is called Kopi Luwak, which comes from the island of Bali in Indonesia.  It retails at about $100 per pound of grounds.  It’s got a devoted following among those who swear the taste is distinct enough that the high price is worth it.  The flavor is attributed not to the trees where the Kopi Luwak is harvested, or the climate.  Credit goes to the Asian palm civet, also known as the civet cat (which is not actually a feline).  The civet cat processes coffee beans the only way a civet cat can: it eats them.  Well, they don’t eat the beans, per se, so much as they swallow them whole.  Then the beans are… excreted.  That’s as nicely as I can put it.

Yes, this is civet cat poop coffee, and people actually drink it.  The fans of Kopi Luwak insist that it tastes like nothing else, and that’s probably true.  Why is it different?  The reasoning is that the civet cats will select certain kinds of coffee beans in the first place, which leads to a particular selection that no human is probably capable of.  What no human is definitely capable of is the appropriate fermentation in the civet cat’s digestive tract, which perfects the flavor of the beans.  These partly-digested beans are then harvested and sold.  Harvesting can be tricky, since traipsing through Indonesian jungles isn’t the most efficient way to gather anything.  Most commonly, the civet cats are kept in cages and given coffee beans (as well as their natural diet of fruits and berries).  Some producers of Kopi Luwak keep the civet cats on reserves, letting them wander freely among the trees as they would in nature.  The appeal of this stems from the controversy over caging the animals and the force feeding of coffee beans in order to increase production.  This practice came to light in 2013, bringing attention to the high mortality rate in inflicts on the civet cats.

Civet cats aren’t a threatened species, due to their commercial value, but their wild populations are declining, since Kopi Luwak producers have incentive to capture them.  Civet cats are native to a wide swath of territory as far west as India and as far east as Borneo and the Philippines.  Demand for this gourmet coffee is leading to their introduction into islands farther east in Indonesia.

If you ever worry that you’re overpaying for your coffee, just think of Kopi Luwak and how much more you could pay!

Image result for civet cat
The Malayan civet cat: aficionado of fine coffee beans.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game would have to hose down the rink in or

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d just throw it away.  Though if there were