Do you know where your coffee comes from? Would you care if what you were drinking partly came
from poop? Not only do people drink such a thing - they pay top dollar for it.
Here is the story of the world’s most expensive coffee.
Let’s go back to the beginning - way back. In 1596, the first Dutch traders came to Indonesia,
hoping to get in on the lucrative spice trade that was then dominated by Portuguese traders. By 1602,
the Dutch East India Company was established, combining rival companies into one corporation.
Through the company, the Dutch colonized much of Indonesia, using their hold on
the land to expand into other ventures. That, of course, included coffee. The Dutch brought
the initial Arabica beans into the country in 1696, exporting its first shipment in
1711. The profitability of the product led to an increased focus in its production,
one that continues to this day - Indonesia is among the top five coffee producers in the world.
However, the process of growing and cultivating the crop - including,
of course, the importation of non-native coffee plants - meant profitability could only come
through increased volume of product. Not only that - the Dutch colonial government enforced a policy
called Culturstessel - the Cultivation System. Especially rampant in Java, this system replaced
land taxes with forced farming: 20 percent of a village’s land had to be devoted to government
crops intended for export. An alternative required peasants to work the government farms 60 days out
of the year. Either way you slice it, they were slaves to the Dutch colonizers, unable
to roam from their villages without permission, prevented from cultivating enough land to grow
their own crops for food, and prohibited from even sampling the very coffee they were forced to grow.
The farmers found a way around it - Asian palm civets.
Civets are all over South and Southeast Asia, and they’ve been there since the Pleistocene era.
They’re solitary and mostly nocturnal - they won’t even come out if the moon is too bright!
In fact, little of their behavior has actually been witnessed - except for their diet.
Mango, palm flower sap, rambutan, it’s all fair game to the civet. In places like Sri Lanka, their
constant raids on fruit farms have given them a reputation as pests to be exterminated - though
whatever efforts may have been in that regard, they are still classified as LEAST CONCERN by the
International Union for Conservation of Nature. Part of the reason for that is their adaptability
to their habitat; another part is their longevity combined with the expanse of their domain.
But some speculate that what’s really keeping them alive is their usefulness to the coffee trade.
See, among the fruits civets love are the cherries from the Arabica and Robusta coffea plants
brought to Indonesia from Ethiopia and Yemen. The civets are a discerning bunch:
they leave the unripened fruit alone, preferring to devour the deep red cherries,
known for a flavor that’s either sweet, like a watermelon-raspberry combo,
or floral, like jasmine. They come out at night, they eat the cherries from the coffee plants,
they digest the fruit, they poop. And in that poop? Coffee beans - undigested coffee beans.
Beans that were still left whole, so that the enterprising farmer who found them could
take them out of the dung, wash them, roast them, and make a cup of coffee from them.
This became the Indonesian farmers’ secret - and it proved to be a good one to have. While
painstaking in its collection, the beans yielded a coffee with a one-of-a-kind flavor. First of all,
the civets’ pickiness meant only the best beans were being cultivated. Secondly, the digestive
process made for a unique filtering system - proteins that usually affect flavor and aroma were
instead broken down in the civets’ stomach, while levels of acidity were lowered and the amount of
caffeine decreased. The farmers considered the new beverage a better-tasting, better-smelling
alternative to the enforced product. They called it KOPI LUWAK - literally, “civet coffee.”
So, what’s the actual process? Simple. Just go out into the jungle in the after-dawn mist,
after the civets have retired. Find a pile of their poop, studded with coffee beans - actually,
let’s be realistic, you’ll want several piles of poop. It could take hours, but it’s easy to
spot - again, the beans really do not digest. Collect the piles with the help of a banana
leaf or other natural parcel. Bring it back to the farm for proper cleaning. That means pouring the
morning’s finds across a sifter, hopefully wearing a protective garment over your hand, and, well,
sifting. Get all the poop and dirt and other luwak “trash,” as the farmers call it,
out of the beans. Sort through the beans left over so that only the perfect specimens survive.
Wash thoroughly with water. Allow them to dry in the sun - modern farmers actually
rake the piles into large tracts of beans for a thorough dry. The dry beans are then returned
to the sifter for paring with a hard brush, making sure to peel the outer shell away to
get to the desired bean within. Any remaining skin is removed, the beans sorted by hand.
Eventually, the Dutch plantation owners got wind of this bootleg java - that is,
if not the source, they at least knew the farmers were making their own coffee in secret.
Rather than risk being accused of stealing from their oppressors, the Indonesian farmers let
them in on the secret, teaching the colonizers how to harvest and make a cup of kopi luwak.
It was a hit - the Dutch liked the flavor, admired the ingenuity, and most importantly,
noted that the limited supply meant a significant markup in price. What was once a desperate
attempt by exploited farmers to maintain some individual income became a gourmet commodity.
So who brought kopi luwak into the modern mainstream? National Geographic first wrote
about it, albeit briefly, in 1981. Coffee consultant and author Tony Wild is credited
by many - including himself - with bringing it into popular consciousness in 1991.
He read the National Geographic article, and it inspired him to import a sample of the
product over to the United Kingdom - a media blitz ensued, making kopi luwak, Tony Wild,
and the firm he worked for, tea company Taylors of Harrogate, famous. Briefly, at the very least.
More recent writings about kopi luwak credit the 2007 film The Bucket List
with revitalizing the clamor for fertilized beans - it’s the preferred beverage of the
billionaire played by Jack Nicholson. Who wouldn’t want to live like billionaire Jack?
Whenever it happened, the demand for kopi luwak increased. Partly for that famously
unique flavor and smoothness, partly for the novelty of drinking something made from poop.
And like anything big business and mass production get their hands on,
prices have gone up, quality gone down, and the source has been grossly misused and abused.
Remember, the civets are solitary, nocturnal creatures - they come to eat and disappear
into the night. Most of the time, all you see of them is their poop. And going out into the wild,
locating and gathering enough droppings, from which to harvest enough coffee beans to make even
a cup, is time-consuming. Even though everyone agrees that’s the best way to make a satisfying
cup of kopi luwak. But big business doesn’t have that kind of time to keep up with demand.
And so, some plantations have created Civet Farms.
Basically, it’s this: civets in cages, with nothing to eat except a bowl full of coffee
cherries. On a pure coffee-making level, this has compromised the quality of the product:
civets in the wild are picky. The farmers filling the bowls for caged civets are not.
But what about the actual civets? In 2016, conservationists assessed the
living conditions of civets on sixteen coffee plantations in Bali. Here’s what they found:
civets living in cages that were sometimes too small for them to comfortably move around in;
floors made of wire mesh with no other padding or covering to relieve discomfort; cages left
uncleaned, forcing the animals to stay in their own urine and feces; civets kept together, or
else with their cages stacked against each other, a nightmare for an animal that prefers solitude.
Some are kept on a strict diet of coffee cherries, meaning they’re not getting nutrients from other
foods they’d eat in the wild, such as insects and reptiles; this can lead to malnourishment.
If they refuse, they are sometimes force-fed the cherries by farmers. And of course, their catlike
appearance has made them a spectacle for tourists, keeping the nocturnal creatures surrounded
by constant noise and activity during the day, stressing them and disrupting their sleep cycle.
There have been reports of fur loss, aggressive behavior, and high mortality rates.
And it’s not like you can just buy from a more ethical brand, either. Organizations like the
Rainforest Alliance, which works to ensure standards of sustainability in agriculture, refuse
to certify any kopi luwak, since it’s difficult to confirm what’s been harvested from wild poop,
and what’s come from caged animals. It doesn’t help, of course, that a lot of companies falsely
label their products, in order to maintain the legend of scat found in the forest.
Tony Wild himself even stated that the coffee companies selling kopi luwak grossly and purposely
understate the amount they harvest in a year, so as to bolster the coffee’s reputation as a rare,
hard-to-make novelty. And yet even by that token, other coffee know-it-alls
claim that there are more pounds of kopi luwak sold than actually made - that is to say,
fraud is rampant in the kopi luwak trade. The man known for bringing the most unusual
cup of coffee such widespread attention that it became the most expensive cup of coffee,
now calls it - and this is a direct quote from a piece he wrote for The Guardian - “a
grotesque cancer that constantly mutates into yet more vile and virulent forms.”
By “more vile and virulent forms,” we assume he’s talking about the variants - yes, there’s
a whole variety of coffee harvested from beans either spat or sat out by animals. In Brazil,
a small biodynamic plantation found that its coffee cherry plants were being picked clean
with the arrival of the endangered Jacu bird - rather than try to stop them, the owner shifted to
picking the coffee beans out of the bird poop…and make his own version of Kopi Luwak. They even keep
the membrane from peeled beans to make a special tea. In Peru, Uchunari Coffee is made using beans
collected from the scat left behind by coatis, in a process that sounds almost identical to
the kopi luwak tradition. In Thailand, the Black Ivory Coffee Company operates through
an elephant sanctuary. They feed their family of pachyderm coffee cherries mixed in with whatever
else they enjoy - bananas, tamarind, whatever the individual elephant prefers - finding
their source in the droppings left three days later. And as if poop isn’t enough,
there is also Monkey Spit Coffee in India and Taiwan - just as it sounds, the harvest comes from
the beans spat out by macaques and rhesus monkeys who just want the fruit of the coffee cherry.
So, is it all worth it? Those who swear by these unique coffees acclaim their lack of bitterness.
They also praise the natural flavors and aromas brought to the beans by the natural diets of
the animals - it’s said that the Jacu bird coffee tends to have natural cinnamon notes,
and Black Ivory Coffee Company says their Thai elephant brand may contain chocolate or even
leathery flavors. Critics of the coffee say otherwise. Within the realm of international
coffee connoisseurs, kopi luwak and its ilk are generally sniffed at - they may be less bitter,
but bitterness is part of coffee’s appeal; whatever flavors they may possess are extremely
mild, if not outright bad; and besides all that, it’s an extremely prohibitive cost
with very little value for your money. Consumers who can afford it are paying 100 dollars a cup
for weak sludge…and the opportunity to tell their friends that they drink poop.
Now go check out Why Is Caviar So Expensive? Or click this other video instead!