Luwak Coffe: is it good?

Wild Luwak

Recently ousting Jamaican Blue Mountain as the world’s most expensive coffee, around 700kg of cat-poo (or more commonly Luwak) coffee are produced around the world each year, and can fetch as much as $770 a kg in London.



The coffee is made by picking out and roasting partially digested coffee beans from the feces of the South-East Asian palm civet or Luwak, that live around the coffee plantations.

Wave of high profile bad press, including the The Guardian, The Economist, and again (they're loving this) The Guardian have brought the ethical issues of Coffee Luwak to the attention of the world. But is the coffee really worth it? And where can you find ethically sourced Kopi Luwak?



Palm Civet facts

    The Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), or Luwak is native to Africa and south east Asia
    Luwaks inhabit tropical rain forest, eating fruit, and famously ripe coffee cherry
    Throughout tropical south east Asia including - Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, Civet poo is used to produce the very expensive Coffee Luwak

A brief history

In a nutshell... or a pooped coffee bean... Dutch colonizers first introduced a Yemeni coffee beans into Indonesia in 1696. Coffee cultivation grew and spread throughout the archipelago. The Palm Civet soon took a liking to the juicy ripe coffee fruit. After initially trying to get rid of the “pests” from their coffee plantations, locals took the natural step and tried roasting the nutty poop (like you do), word spread, and the rest is history.

An more informative description of the whole Coffee Luwak process can be found here

So is Coffee Luwak that good?

In technical terms, during the digestive process the coffee cherry flesh is removed leaving the coffee bean inside an inner skin, called the pergamino or parchment. The parchment is permeable allowing acids in the luwak's stomach to soak the beans causing the destruction of some of the proteins in the coffee and altering their final taste. It is THIS, that leads purveyors of Coffee Luwak uphold the fine tastes (and justify the a high price). The cynic could be forgiven for believing that it is merely the novelty value of trying cat-crap coffee.

Wild Dried Civet Poop

Whilst I am no coffee expert, a major reason for the original quality of Kopi Luwak was clearly the fact that you had these free range animals wandering care-free around the plantations, getting a well-balanced organic diet, and presumably selecting the tastiest coffees cherries.


Ultimately, a lack of market control has made the hunt for genuine free-range Luwak Coffee very difficult.