Kopi Luwak
Encyclopedia
Kopi luwak (ˈkopi ˈlu.aʔ), or civet coffee, is one of the world's most expensive and low-production varieties of coffee
Coffee
Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark,init brooo acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia,...

. It is made from the beans of coffee berries
Coffea
Coffea is a genus of flowering plants in the Rubiaceae family. They are shrubs or small trees native to tropical and southern Africa and tropical Asia. Seeds of several species are the source of the popular beverage coffee. Coffee ranks as one of the world's most valuable and widely traded...

 which have been eaten by the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) and other related civets, then passed through its digestive tract. A civet eats the berries for their fleshy pulp. In its stomach, proteolytic enzymes
Protease
A protease is any enzyme that conducts proteolysis, that is, begins protein catabolism by hydrolysis of the peptide bonds that link amino acids together in the polypeptide chain forming the protein....

 seep into the beans, making shorter peptide
Peptide
Peptides are short polymers of amino acid monomers linked by peptide bonds. They are distinguished from proteins on the basis of size, typically containing less than 50 monomer units. The shortest peptides are dipeptides, consisting of two amino acids joined by a single peptide bond...

s and more free amino acid
Amino acid
Amino acids are molecules containing an amine group, a carboxylic acid group and a side-chain that varies between different amino acids. The key elements of an amino acid are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen...

s. Passing through a civet's intestines the beans are then defecated
Defecation
Defecation is the final act of digestion by which organisms eliminate solid, semisolid or liquid waste material from the digestive tract via the anus. Waves of muscular contraction known as peristalsis in the walls of the colon move fecal matter through the digestive tract towards the rectum...

, keeping their shape. After gathering, thorough washing, sun drying, light roasting and brewing, these beans yield an aromatic coffee with much less bitterness, widely noted as the most expensive coffee in the world with prices reaching $160 per pound.

Kopi luwak is produced mainly on the islands of Sumatra
Sumatra
Sumatra is an island in western Indonesia, westernmost of the Sunda Islands. It is the largest island entirely in Indonesia , and the sixth largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 with a population of 50,365,538...

, Java, Bali
Bali
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east...

 and Sulawesi
Sulawesi
Sulawesi is one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia and is situated between Borneo and the Maluku Islands. In Indonesia, only Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua are larger in territory, and only Java and Sumatra have larger Indonesian populations.- Etymology :The Portuguese were the first to...

 in the Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

n Archipelago, and also in the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...

 (where the product is called motit coffee in the Cordillera and kape alamid in Tagalog
Tagalog language
Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a third of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by most of the rest. It is the first language of the Philippine region IV and of Metro Manila...

 areas) and also in East Timor
East Timor
The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, commonly known as East Timor , is a state in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecusse, an exclave on the northwestern side of the island, within Indonesian West Timor...

 (where it is called kafé-laku). Weasel coffee is a loose English translation of its name cà phê Chồn in Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

, where popular, chemically simulated versions are also produced. However, 2 farms have 300 civets in the wild in Dak Lak, the farmers collect the coffee seeds, they produce 300kg only of authentic vietnamese chon cofffee. The civets live in the wild and are fed beef. The processed civet beans are processed and imported to the UK to the farmers' sole UK supplier.

History

The origin of Kopi Luwak is closely connected with the history of Coffee production in Indonesia. In the early 18th century the Dutch
Dutch people
The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...

 established the cash-crop plantations in their colony in Dutch East Indies
Dutch East Indies
The Dutch East Indies was a Dutch colony that became modern Indonesia following World War II. It was formed from the nationalised colonies of the Dutch East India Company, which came under the administration of the Netherlands government in 1800....

 islands of Java and Sumatra, including Arabica coffee introduced from Yemen. During the era of Cultuurstelsel (1830—1870), or roughly, colonization, as Europeans saw others nation as lower-degreed than themselves, wanting to rob natural resources by keeping the natives low-lived, the Dutch prohibited the native farmers and plantation workers to pick coffee fruits for their own use. Yet the native farmers wanted to have a taste of the famed coffee beverage. Soon, the natives learned that certain species of musang or luwak (Asian Palm Civet) consumed these coffee fruits, yet they left the coffee seeds undigested in their droppings. The natives collected these Luwak's dropping coffee seeds; cleaned, roasted and ground it to make their own coffee beverage. The fame of aromatic civet coffee spread from locals to Dutch plantation owners and soon become their favourite, yet because of its rarity and unusual process, the civet coffee was expensive even in colonial times.

Cultivars, blends, and tastes

Kopi luwak is a name for many specific cultivars and blends of arabica
Coffea arabica
Coffea arabica is a species of Coffea originally indigenous to the mountains of Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, hence its name, and also from the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia and southeastern Sudan. It is also known as the "coffee shrub of Arabia", "mountain coffee" or "arabica coffee"...

, robusta, liberica
Coffea liberica
Coffea liberica is a species of flowering plant in the Rubiaceae family. It is a coffee that is found in Liberia, West Africa.-Cultivation and Use:...

, excelsa or other beans eaten by civets, hence the taste can vary greatly. Nonetheless, kopi luwak coffees have a shared aroma profile and flavor characteristics, along with their lack of bitterness.

Kopi Luwak has a thick texture and tastes vary depending on roasting levels. Usually, levels range only from cinnamon color to medium, with little or no caramelization of sugars within the beans as happens with heavy roasting. Moreover, kopi luwaks which have very smooth profiles are most often given a lighter roast, however at first tastes, it can seem a bit strong in flavor. Iced kopi luwak brews may bring out some flavors not found in other coffees. Berries eaten by Civets give Kopi Luwak a pungent, sometimes bitter taste, though vary depending on the diet of the Civet.

Sumatra
Sumatra
Sumatra is an island in western Indonesia, westernmost of the Sunda Islands. It is the largest island entirely in Indonesia , and the sixth largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 with a population of 50,365,538...

 is the world's largest regional producer of kopi luwak. Sumatran civet coffee beans are mostly an early arabica
Coffea arabica
Coffea arabica is a species of Coffea originally indigenous to the mountains of Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, hence its name, and also from the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia and southeastern Sudan. It is also known as the "coffee shrub of Arabia", "mountain coffee" or "arabica coffee"...

 variety cultivated in the Indonesian archipelago since the seventeenth century. The major Sumatran kopi luwak production area is in Lampung
Lampung
Lampung is a province of Indonesia. It is located on the southern tip of the island of Sumatra and borders the provinces of Bengkulu and South Sumatra. Lampung is the original home of the Lampung people, who speak a distinct language from other people in Sumatra and have their own alphabet. Its...

, Bengkulu
Bengkulu
Bengkulu is a province of Indonesia. It is on the southwest coast of the island of Sumatra, and borders the provinces of West Sumatra, Jambi, South Sumatra and Lampung. The capital and largest city is Bengkulu city. It was formerly the site of a British garrison, which they called Bencoolen...

 and Aceh
Aceh
Aceh is a special region of Indonesia, located on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. Its full name is Daerah Istimewa Aceh , Nanggroë Aceh Darussalam and Aceh . Past spellings of its name include Acheh, Atjeh and Achin...

 especially the Gayo region, Takengon
Takengon
Takengon is a town in Aceh, a province of Indonesia and is the seat of the Central Aceh Regency. The town is in the highlands of western Sumatra and situated on the shores of Lake Lut Tawar. The region around Takengon is well-known for its coffee. The indigenous people in Takengon are the Gayonese...

. Tagalog
Tagalog people
The Tagalog people are an ethnic group in the Philippines. The name Tagalog comes from either the native term tagá-ilog, meaning 'people living along the river', or another native term, tagá-alog, meaning 'people living along the ford', a ford being a shallow part of a river or stream where people,...

 cafe alamid (or alamid cafe) comes from civets fed on a mixture of coffee beans and is sold in the Batangas
Batangas
Batangas is a first class province of the Philippines located on the southwestern part of Luzon in the CALABARZON region. Its capital is Batangas City and it is bordered by the provinces of Cavite and Laguna to the north and Quezon to the east. Across the Verde Island Passages to the south is the...

 region along with gift shops near airports in the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...

.

Kopi muncak

Kopi muncak (or kopi muntjak), a different type of coffee produced in a similar process, is made from the dung of barking deer
Deer
Deer are the ruminant mammals forming the family Cervidae. Species in the Cervidae family include white-tailed deer, elk, moose, red deer, reindeer, fallow deer, roe deer and chital. Male deer of all species and female reindeer grow and shed new antlers each year...

 (muntjac
Muntjac
Muntjac, also known as Barking Deer and Mastreani Deer, are small deer of the genus Muntiacus. Muntjac are the oldest known deer, appearing 15–35 million years ago, with remains found in Miocene deposits in France, Germany and Poland....

) found throughout Southeast Asia. Unlike civet coffee, Kopi muncak is mostly gathered in the wild, chiefly in Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

n Archipelago.

Production

Kopi is the Indonesian
Indonesian language
Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....

 word for coffee. Luwak is a local name of the Asian Palm Civet in Sumatra. Palm civets are primarily frugivorous
Frugivore
A frugivore is a fruit eater. It can be any type of herbivore or omnivore where fruit is a preferred food type. Because approximately 20% of all mammalian herbivores also eat fruit, frugivory is considered to be common among mammals. Since frugivores eat a lot of fruit they are highly dependent...

, feeding on berries and pulpy fruits such as from fig trees
Ficus
Ficus is a genus of about 850 species of woody trees, shrubs, vines, epiphytes, and hemiepiphyte in the family Moraceae. Collectively known as fig trees or figs, they are native throughout the tropics with a few species extending into the semi-warm temperate zone. The Common Fig Ficus is a genus of...

 and palms
Arecaceae
Arecaceae or Palmae , are a family of flowering plants, the only family in the monocot order Arecales. There are roughly 202 currently known genera with around 2600 species, most of which are restricted to tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate climates...

. Civets also eat small vertebrates, insects, ripe fruits and seeds.

Early production began when beans were gathered in the wild from where a civet would defecate as a means to mark its territory. On farms, civets are either caged or allowed to roam within defined boundaries. The capture and caging of wild civets has caused some concern within the coffee industry over witnessed accounts of animal cruelty, and there have been calls for production to become regulated to help consumers avoid contributing to unethical production methods.

Coffee cherries are eaten by a civet for their fruit pulp. After spending about a day and a half in the civet's digestive tract the beans are then defecated in clumps, having kept their shape and still covered with some of the fleshy berry's inner layers. They are gathered, thoroughly washed, sun dried and given only a light roast so as to keep the many intertwined flavors and lack of bitterness yielded inside the civet.

Research

Several studies have examined the process in which the animal's stomach acids and enzymes digest the beans' covering and ferment the beans. Research by food scientist Massimo Marcone at the University of Guelph
University of Guelph
The University of Guelph, also known as U of G, is a comprehensive public research university in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. It was established in 1964 after the amalgamation of Ontario Agricultural College, the Macdonald Institute, and the Ontario Veterinary College...

 in Ontario, Canada showed that the civet's endogenous digestive secretions seep into the beans. These secretions carry proteolytic enzymes
Protease
A protease is any enzyme that conducts proteolysis, that is, begins protein catabolism by hydrolysis of the peptide bonds that link amino acids together in the polypeptide chain forming the protein....

 which break down the beans' proteins, yielding shorter peptide
Peptide
Peptides are short polymers of amino acid monomers linked by peptide bonds. They are distinguished from proteins on the basis of size, typically containing less than 50 monomer units. The shortest peptides are dipeptides, consisting of two amino acids joined by a single peptide bond...

s and more free amino acid
Amino acid
Amino acids are molecules containing an amine group, a carboxylic acid group and a side-chain that varies between different amino acids. The key elements of an amino acid are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen...

s. Since the flavor of coffee owes much to its proteins, there is a hypothesis that this shift in the numbers and kinds of proteins in beans after being swallowed by civets brings forth their unique flavor. The proteins are also involved in non-enzymatic Maillard browning
Maillard reaction
The Maillard reaction is a form of nonenzymatic browning similar to caramelization. It results from a chemical reaction between an amino acid and a reducing sugar, usually requiring heat....

 reactions brought about later by roasting. Moreover, while inside a civet the beans begin to germinate by malt
Malt
Malt is germinated cereal grains that have been dried in a process known as "malting". The grains are made to germinate by soaking in water, and are then halted from germinating further by drying with hot air...

ing which also lowers their bitterness.

At the outset of his research Marcone doubted the safety of kopi luwak. However, he found that after the thorough washing, levels of harmful organisms were insignificant. Roasting at high temperature has been cited as making the beans safer after washing.

Civet coffee imitation

Research into the palm civet's digestive processes and the transformation of the beans' proteins has led to the discovery of innovative ways to imitate the taste of kopi luwak without the civet's involvement. It is a response to the decrease in civet population, caused by hunting for meat. Kopi luwak production involves a great deal of labor, whether farmed or wild-gathered. The small production quantity and the labor involved in production contribute to the coffee's high cost. The high price of kopi luwak is another factor that drives the search for a way to produce kopi luwak in large quantities, lowering the cost.

The University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...

 has developed a way to recreate how nature produces Kopi Luwak without the involvement of any animals. This technology has been licensed to a Gainesville Florida firm, Coffee Primero, which now produces and distributes that product at a price competitive with ordinary quality coffees.

The Trung Nguyên Coffee Company
Trung Nguyên
Trung Nguyên is a Vietnam-based business group involved in the production, processing and distribution of coffee. Trung Nguyên is a major domestic coffee brand within Vietnam, and exports its products to 25 countries, including major Asian markets such as Japan and Singapore.It is most noted for...

 in Vietnam, through its work in isolating the civet's digestive enzymes, has patented its own synthetic enzyme soak, which is used in its Legendee brand simulated kopi luwak coffee.

Price and availability

Kopi luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world, selling for between US$100 and $600 per pound. The specialty Vietnamese weasel coffee, which is made by collecting coffee beans eaten by wild civets, is sold at $6600 per kilogram ($3000 per pound). Most customers are in Asia – especially Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Sources vary widely as to annual worldwide production.

In November 2006 Herveys Range Heritage Tea Rooms
Herveys Range Heritage Tea Rooms
The Herveys Range Heritage Tea Rooms are an historical cafe and a self-contained holiday cabin located at the top of Herveys Range, approximately 45 km north-west of Townsville in North Queensland, Australia. They are owned by Allan and Michelle Sharpe...

, a small cafe in the hills outside Townsville
Townsville, Queensland
Townsville is a city on the north-eastern coast of Australia, in the state of Queensland. Adjacent to the central section of the Great Barrier Reef, it is in the dry tropics region of Queensland. Townsville is Australia's largest urban centre north of the Sunshine Coast, with a 2006 census...

 in Queensland, Australia, put kopi luwak coffee on its menu at A$
Australian dollar
The Australian dollar is the currency of the Commonwealth of Australia, including Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, and Norfolk Island, as well as the independent Pacific Island states of Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu...

50.00 (US $35.00 PPP) a cup, selling about seven cups a week, which gained nationwide Australian and international press. In April 2008 the brasserie at Peter Jones department store in London's Sloane Square
Sloane Square
Sloane Square is a small hard-landscaped square on the boundaries of the fashionable London districts of Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Chelsea, located southwest of Charing Cross, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The square is part of the Hans Town area designed in 1771 by Henry...

 began selling a blend of kopi luwak and Blue Mountain
Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee
Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee or Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee is a classification of coffee grown in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. The best lots of Blue Mountain coffee are noted for their mild flavour and lack of bitterness...

 called Caffe Raro for £50 (US $79.00) a cup. Peck in downtown Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

 sells a small espresso cup for 15 euros.

As of 8 September 2011, the high-end restaurant Essence of Europe in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China sells a two-cup serving for 498 RMB (US $80). The beans (cleaned and roasted) are certified by Indonesian export authorities and the individually sealed serving is prepared for drinking in view of the customer's table.

Coffee Primero sells their "Magic Cat" line of coffee, which is made with their exclusive process developed by the University of Florida that mimicks how nature creates Kopi Luwak without the involvement of any animals, for $15.99 per pound.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK