Indonesian 'kopi luwak' not for the faint-hearted

Indonesian 'kopi luwak' not for the faint-hearted

Dan Eaton, Reuters, Jakarta

How much would you pay for a cup of liquid cat dung?

Quite a lot, if some highly discerning coffee drinkers are
anything to go by.

On the lush, volcanic slopes of the Indonesian archipelago,
villagers "harvest" kopi luwak. The beans used for the world's
rarest and most expensive coffee have already been munched by
cat-like palm civets, and now they are plucked from the dung to
be dried and roasted.

Retailing in North America and Europe for up to US$600 per
kilogram, kopi luwak, literally "civet coffee" in Indonesian, is
not a brew for the faint hearted.

Less than 230 kg of it are estimated to be produced a year on
the islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, and war and disease
are making it even harder to find.

"I first read about it in 1980 but didn't manage to get my
hands on any until 1993," says Michael Beech of Raven's Brew
Coffee Inc. Until last year, when supplies began to dry up, it
was the main supplier of kopi luwak in the United States.

His clients have ranged from ordinary java junkies to comedy
actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame, he says. The firm has a
backlog of 300 kopi luwak orders to fill at $75 a quarter pound.

"To be honest, you can't get $75 worth of quality in any
coffee. You are really paying for the experience," says Beech.

The brew has become so rare that a newly published book on
coffee in Indonesia, A cup of Java, relegates it to legend.

"We have failed to find any coffee-seller who admits to
actually selling kopi luwak from the feces of the civet cat,"
write authors Gabriella Teggia and Mark Hanusz.

To many Indonesians, the term kopi luwak has come to mean
simply the beans which the civet -- a notoriously fussy eater
which selects only the ripest coffee cherries -- would choose.

"We just use the name for branding, but we don't trade in it,"
says Jeffrey Susanto, whose family runs the Kopi Luwak string of
gourmet coffee shops in Jakarta.

The rarity of kopi luwak is confirmed by Nugroho Bintang
Satrio, the Central Java chief of the Indonesian Coffee Exporters
Association.

"Only a tiny portion of small-holders are left who collect
it," he said, adding that traders buy it at about Rp 11,000
($1.30) per kilo, about twice the price of ordinary robusta.

In the last year, a government offensive against rebels in
rugged Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra has also cut
into supply. "Farmers get killed if they harvest the coffee too
far into the bush," said one trader.

Then there is the bad press caused by the deadly flu-like SARS
virus. Civets, which are not cats but are related to mongooses,
have been slaughtered in their thousands in China and imports
banned from many Western countries for fear they carry SARS.

"Even if SARS was associated with the coffee itself, by the
time it's collected and washed there is a very long period that
has elapsed," says Massimo Marcone, a food scientist at the
University of Guelph in Canada, who has carried out extensive
tests on kopi luwak and deemed it safe.

Yet despite all that, some still harbor doubts.

"Sumatra, in the popular imagination anyway, is just too close
to China and I'm just wary of the whole SARS thing," says Beech,
adding that Raven's Brew may cease to offer kopi luwak.

"We are working on an elephant poop coffee," he says with a
chuckle, explaining a plan he vows is serious. The plan is to
feed coffee to tuskers at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka and
sell the product, farming the proceeds back into the orphanage.

"It will be a do-gooder coffee, pooped out by bonafide orphan
elephants," Beech explains.

According to some experts, a bean that has been partly
digested tastes special.

"What I did find with kopi luwak was that the acids, the
gastric juices and the enzymes were actually getting inside the
bean and breaking down the proteins," says Marcone.

"You start getting amino acids. When these things are heated
during roasting, they react with other components and they create
certain flavor compounds different from other beans."

So what does the world's most pricey coffee taste like? Coffee
buffs say it depends on whether the civet has been eating arabica
or robusta beans.

"Initially people thought it must be the best coffee in the
world, but I have to be honest about it, it's a crappy cup of
coffee," says Beech of the robusta variety.

No matter how exotic the processing, it is mostly robusta
cherries the luwak munches. That fact is a legacy of the coffee
blight which in 1878 destroyed every low-lying arabica plant from
Ceylon to Timor, allowing Brazil and Colombia to take the lead as
the world's main suppliers of arabica.

Weeks of phone calls around Indonesia results in a fragrant
mailbox containing a brown envelope from an East Java coffee
trader. Inside is 250 grams of brown gold -- kopi luwak arabica.

The aroma is rich and strong and the beans oily. Ground and
steeped in boiling water the flavor is, well, much like any other
coffee. But the experience lingers in the memory.

GetRTR 3.00 -- APR 5, 2004 08:38:52