Of cats and coffee
By Jim Surber

First, I must confess that I have never been a coffee drinker. I have never liked the taste but certainly have no quarrel with those who do. Like chewing tobacco, I tried it but never liked it.

That said, I was intrigued by a recent news article describing how scientists have designed a test to verify the genuineness of the world’s most expensive coffee bean called Kopi Luwak. By using a “metabolic fingerprint,” with something called metabolomics technology, the real coffee bean can be separated from counterfeits.

The brew from this rare and exotic bean can cost up to $80 per cup with the beans fetching up to $600 per pound.

More fascinating is that this coffee is not raised in the South American highlands, selectively hand-picked by an amiable old man and carried to civilization in a cloth bag on the back of his trusty donkey. Kopi Luwak comes from Indonesia and is harvested from cat scat.

You read that correctly, the most prized and expensive coffee on the planet has a less than palatable origin. Coffee aficionados have described the taste as, "unique, mild, and smooth with a hint of dark chocolate and secondary notes of earth and musk."

But to create those intricate flavors, the coffee berry must first pass through the digestive tract of the Asian palm civet, a small, nocturnal, cat that lives in the trees of Indonesia. The cat is very picky and only eats the best and ripest coffee fruits.

Once inside the animal’s guts, something strange and wonderful happens, leaving an enriched coffee bean to be harvested from the animal’s feces. Cleaned and washed, they have acquired a unique and highly prized taste from their passage through the civet’s digestive tract, and the anal scent glands they use for marking their territory. Being wild and hard to collect, kopi luwak is not a commercially viable crop, but just an interesting coffee curiosity.

A coffee historian described the coffee bean-laden cat dropping as looking like an “Oh Henry bar” when seen in the wild. He further stated that, “It is incredibly expensive because it’s so rare.” And it’s not even as rare as it used to be.

It seems that entrepreneurs have capitalized on the demand for this rarity. Wild civets, the trapping of which is supposed to be strictly controlled by Indonesia, are caught by poachers. They are then caged and force-fed coffee cherries in order to crap out the beans for the pleasure of thousands who have been conned into buying this incredibly rare and very expensive luxury coffee.

To add insult to injury, these “civet farmers” feed the animals cheaper varieties of coffee fruit, like the ones most often used to make instant coffee. As it always goes, a “fetish” market incentivizes less-than-ethical practices.

Perhaps the scientists would have done the world, and the civet, a bigger favor if they had discovered a test to determine if the beans came from wild or caged animals.

Kopi luwak is now the name for any beans collected from the excrement of civets and the taste may vary with the type and origin of beans ingested, processing subsequent to collection, roasting, ageing and brewing.

According to experts, the ability of the civet to select the berries, and other aspects of the civet's diet and health (like stress levels) may also influence the processing and hence the taste.

Unfortunately, today if you purchase some of the prized beans, it probably won’t be true Indonesian kopi luwak, but one of the other numerous “crap coffees” that have sprung up worldwide. The list of animals used includes Thai elephants, Brazilian jacu birds, and Bonobo monkeys which have all been impressed into servicing consumers’ insatiable desire for the weird and ostensibly wonderful.

While the story and description of the world’s most expensive coffee is fascinating, I found myself baffled while speculating on how people were first enticed to discover the taste of this rare elixir.

It has been said that it was a brave man who ate the first oyster. You would think it took a far braver chap to collect a cat’s bean-laden fudge dragon, pick out the beans, grind them to brew a cup of coffee, and discover a diamond in the rough. What would have tempted the discoverer?

It turns out that the simplest answer is correct.

In the early 18th century, the Dutch established cash-crop coffee plantations in the East Indie islands of Java and Sumatra. From 1830-1870, the business-minded Dutch prohibited the native farmers and plantation workers from picking coffee fruits for their own use.

In spite of this prohibition, the natives still wanted to enjoy coffee. They had always known that the civet cat consumed the fruits and left the coffee seeds undigested in their droppings. Since the Dutch had not prohibited the harvesting of cat poop, the natives collected, cleaned, roasted and ground them to make their coffee. (A unique twist on the biblical “crumbs from the rich man’s table”)

The fame of the aromatic brew spread from locals to the Dutch plantation owners and it soon became their favorite. Because of the rarity and unusual processing, the coffee was very expensive even in colonial times.

I hope all who read this are as enlightened as I was to learn that the world’s best coffee does not come in a white cup with a green mermaid on the side, but falls from the rear end of a cat. But learning of the chain of events that prompted its discovery was the most fascinating.