BeanScene Magazine

When Allan Sharpe and his wife Michelle started serving Kopi Lewak coffee at their business, Harvey’s Range Heritage Tea Rooms outside of Townsville, he was hoping for an article in the local paper.

Five years later, Allan laughs at the memory, as he counts the number of media outlets where his story ended up: The New York Times, The London Times, The Washington Post, World Press and Reuters World News to name a few. For a while Townsville Enterprises were tracking the value of the coverage, but he says they finally stopped at $5 million.

“It was the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere that made it a story,” Allan says. “It was so much more than just a story of coffee. By the end, the media attention on its own became the story.”

So what was drawing the world’s eyes to a tiny café in Far North Queensland? The coffee isn’t just any brand. It is Kopi Luwak, grown primarily on Indonesia’s islands of Java, Sumatra and Bali. At around $65 for 125 grams, this is known as the “Rolls Royce” of coffee – possibly the most expensive type in the world. But, with such an extravagant reputation it is a humorous notion that Kopi Luwak beans are in fact the product of excrement.

Kopi is the local Indonesian word for coffee and Luwak is the name of a local civet. The beans are cultivated from the droppings of the cat-like civet, that eats the coffee cherries. After spending around a day and a half in the animal’s digestive tract, the beans are defecated in clumps, having kept their shape. They can be further washed and roasted.

The discovery of Kopi Luwak is as fascinating as the product itself. Indonesia was a Dutch colony for three and a half centuries, and the story goes that although the locals were farming the land, they weren’t permitted to pick the coffee for their own use. The cash crop was an important source of income for the colonial Dutch.

Wanting to try the coffee anyway, the innovative Indonesians noticed that the droppings left by the civets living in the coffee plantations left the beans relatively intact. They collected those from the ground and salvaged the beans. The plantation owners soon caught on, tried out the civet variety and found they preferred the taste. 

It’s said that the civets are picky eaters who only select the ripest, sweetest cherries, as a kind of natural selection process. Furthermore, the civet’s digestive process ferments the bean to improve the taste, resulting in a less bitter, sweeter coffee, with a bouquet of caramel and cinnamon.

Allan first came across this information on the internet and launched his hunt for the bean. As an animal by-product its import is strictly controlled, making it something of a nightmare to go through the necessary channels. After a few licensing issues, Allan finally started doing business with Albert Taylor of Mandailing Estate Coffee, a passionate grower who has lived in Indonesia since 1980.

Albert’s own introduction to Kopi Luwak was far more accidental than Allan’s purposeful pursuit. Having worked around Indonesia chartering boats for surfers in remote locations, he decided to settle in Sumatra in the early 1990s when he met his wife.

Albert had heard about Mandailing coffee, a strain of Arabica beans introduced in the West Sumatran highlands by the Dutch in the 19th Century. The coffee strand was thought extinct, until an extensive search uncovered a plantation around 200 years old. Albert was happy enough to be growing this rare form of coffee, when his luck turned once again.

“Twelve years ago, just the idea of growing coffee was great. Then a friend of mine told me over a few beers about this Kopi Luwak and how it was worth like $6000 a pound,” recalls Albert. “I got home, and saw the droppings all over the place.”

With a coffee so rare, Albert knew it wasn’t just a matter of collecting it and shipping it off to the highest bidder.
“If you don’t go about the proper process, you can’t differentiate the coffee,” he explains. “A coffee is a lot like a wine that way.”

While he won’t divulge the secrets to his process, he does note that careful ageing is an important step to really draw out the taste that distinguishes Kopi Luwak. In Sumatra he runs not only the plantation, but also a roasting and processing centre to properly look after his beans.

For guests of Allan and Michelle’s tea house, the result of the secret process is served up at $50 a cup, of which they sell around seven or eight cups a week. It may seem startlingly high, but Allan assures that the price is part of the lure of the experience.

“I’ve found most people aren’t coming in for the taste of the coffee, but really for the experience and the bragging rights,” he says. “They sit back and enjoy it, often buy it for a friend as a gift.”

The coffee is served in special china and anyone drinking it is presented with a certificate. He admits the experience isn’t as much for the coffee purist as it is for the tourist. For anyone coming in to try the coffee, he recommends they drink it as they would their normal coffee.

“If you don’t like a short black, then don’t drink it as a short black. No matter what kind of coffee it is, you won’t enjoy it.”

In addition to this remote Queensland location and Sumatra, Kopi Luwak is accessible in one of Australians’ favourite tourist destinations: Bali, where your coffee correspondent was fortunate enough to try a cup. In the Kintamani District, a regional area a half hour drive from Ubud, Bali’s artistic capital, Kopi Luwak is an important source of supplementary income for the local coffee farmers.

Homang Adnyara works on a coffee plantation in Temen village in the district, where they regularly welcome tourists for the Kopi Luwak experience. Not bringing up the colonial past of the origin of the beans, Homang explains that he’s pretty sure in recent years the coffee from the civet droppings were collected along with the usual harvest and it was only in recent times that they noticed tourists were interested in the beans. They then began actively hunting for the beans to sell to visitors. Civets are nocturnal animals, so people search the grounds at night to find the lucrative droppings.

While a few civets are kept in cages to satisfy tourist curiosity, the vast majority live in the wild. The tasting area sits at the edge of the massive plantation. In jars on the table you can see the droppings as they’re found in the wild and it’s easy to see why someone would get the idea to cultivate the beans. The beans are entirely intact and the droppings look just like a lump of coffee beans rather than animal excrement. It’s a welcome sight for anyone about to take their first sip.

Visitors to the farm are invited to try the non-civet coffee, as well as ginger tea and an array of other complimentary drinks. If you want to try the Kopi Luwak however, it comes at a cost of 40,000 Rupiah, around $4, a pretty high price considering a decent meal might cost you that much in Bali. Those looking to buy the coffee – it costs around 250,000 Rupiah for 125 grams – need to remember that unlike most coffee, Kopi Lewak is considered an animal by-product and won’t make it past Australian quarantine checks.

Dean Merlo, of Merlo Coffee, recently caught onto the Kopi Luwak craze in offering it as their Bean of the Month initiative last December. He notes that while he had long known about the bean, it was difficult to secure authentic stock. However he was able to lock down a reputable wholesaler and bought 30kg. As Merlo was able to secure the bean for an affordable price, they passed those savings along to the consumer who pay just $10 a cup.

“It is traditionally very expensive, and we wanted to ensure a lot of people had the opportunity to try it,” Dean says. However, at such an affordable price, they ran out of the beans in just four days.
Having featured many rare and expensive beans in the past, Dean could hardly believe how fast the beans went.

“We’ve never sold out like that,” he says. “It was really interesting because people who tried it would come back and try it again. I thought they would come just once for the novelty, but I guess people really
like it.”

For those nervous about ingesting something that was once excrement, you are not alone. In fact the University of Guelph’s Massimo Marcone from Canada conducted a study in 2002 looking at exactly that question.

“As a food scientist, I’m sceptical that anything being in contact with faeces is safe,” Massimo reported at the time. But, after a series of tests, he was able to conclude that the Kopi Luwak beans have negligible amounts of the disease-causing organisms usually associated with faeces. Massimo credits the safety of the drink to the careful washing process performed by the local Indonesians collecting the beans.

In addition to finding the beans safe, tests also confirmed what the Dutch had discovered so long ago – that the beans from the droppings really do taste better. Putting aside the explanation that the civets pick the best tasting beans, Massimo found that the Kopi Luwak beans were lower in total protein than the Colombian bean being used in comparison. This is most likely because the proteins were partially broken down during their travel through the cat. Proteins are accredited with much of the bean’s flavour, particularly bitterness, accounting for the coffee’s smoother taste.