saint_monkey

This recent story about kopi luwak, or "Civit Cat Coffee" caught my eye recently.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051230/od_nm/coffee_dc

This is one of those stories that used to make the rounds in early usenet mailings, I think it endures because people enjoy the mental image of a group of snooty coffee snobs sitting around savoring the taste of coffee that had passed through the digestive tract of a small carnivore, and thinking to themselves, "I am sooooooo cool!" There's a definite element of what I like to think of as the "Colombo Factor" here. (The old seventies cop show Colombo was all about class warfare, the "Colombo Factor" is any meme that features or plays into the idea of a working class joe pointing out the silly eccentricities of the upper class.)

This recent story has some of those elements, saying that most of the orders "came from California." ("Cereal Land," as we used to say in middle school, "home of fruits nuts and flakes.")

I used to collect strange internet stories in 1999 and 2000, and I remember that the coffee was thoroughly thrashed as a myth by some serious dietary anthropologists.

I also remember that intrepid marketers in Indonesia were encouraging the myth so that they could jack up the prices for "marks" looking for a unique bragging experience. Strangely, references to these earlier tales are hard to find. (Searching for the coffee used to bring up these stories, not now, the internet is now far too polluted with people trying to sell you kopi luwak, for any serious research on the issue.)¹

In fact, I thought that "Snopes" or the "Straight Dope" had done the debunking, but checking Snopes produces no stories about it, and as for "The Straight Dope," this is their site on the topic,

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010525.html

They treat it as the real deal. In fact, checking the internet archive's snapshots of the page, I find that they've said it was the real deal all the way back in 2001.

Early last year, when SARS was linked to certain varieties of Civit Cat, the idea of kopi luwak as myth, began to resurface, with the spin of "Rich people are going to infect themselves with SARS by drinking civit cat coffee."

An AP story from Jan 20, 2004:

"There are maybe a few bags here, a few bags there, but mostly its just a myth," said Victor Mah, a Singaporean who has been selling coffee from Southeast Asia for more than 25 years....

"I think it's a big scam," said Mark Hanusz, who spent eight months traveling Indonesia researching his book about coffee called "A Cup of Java."

And again in April of 2004, Reuters gave it a whirl ²

"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...

We have failed to find any coffee-seller who admits to actually selling kopi luwak from the faeces 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.

The Smithsonian's National Zoo used to have the following story on its site (since removed.)³

From the desk of Chris Wemmer
Director of the National Zoo's
Conservation & Research Center

Here's the story on Luwak coffee (or Kopi Luwak, in Bahasa Indonesia). The luwak is the common palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) a very widespread species throughout SE Asia, which is also known as the toddy cat because of its fondness of fermented palm sap (or toddy).

In Dutch colonial days Javanese plantation hands were paid to collect the semi-digested berries from the luwak scats (droppings) which could be found on the lanes between the coffee trees. This was sold as a special variety of coffee--Kopi Luwak, in the belief that the toddy cat is able to select berries of optimal ripeness.

To my knowledge this has never been proven, but its a good idea if you want to sell coffee. In the 70s you could buy Kopi Luwak, already roasted and ground in Jakarta. I used to bring it home to give to my friends, who always got a funny look on their face when I explained where it had come from. I didn't tell them, of course, until after they had finished drinking a cup.

The late Director of the Kebun Binatang Ragunan (Jakarta Zoo) told me that the Kopi Luwak story was all bunk. That was old Benjamin Galstaun, a fascinating man of Armenian-Javanese parentage who was fluent in 5 languages. He said anything you got today claiming to be Kopi Luwak was plain old Javanese coffee, with maybe one bean from a civet turd in it to make it legit.
That too, he felt, was a concession to the improbable.

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Best Regards

Roger Sheppard

A March 17th, 1999 Wall Street Journal article found some who recalled the coffee as a vietnamese folk remedy, but no authentic modern purveyors could be located. (At least, not in 1999.) The article implied that the beans passed by the cat were being collected by pickers, and then processed along with the rest of the coffee. Waste not, want not. (So to speak.)

In this poor nation, people make every bean count, explains one such farmer, Tran Thi Phuoc... she was able to gather two kilos of cafe cut chon with her December harvest, she boasts.

What she and other farmers don't keep for their own pleasure is mixed with the rest of their crop, sold to middlemen, and eventually milled and marketed world-wide. "Dealers don't believe it's caphe chon, anyway," she says.

So there is such a thing, but buyers won't believe the pickers when they sell it, and sellers all claim they have it, so it seems to me that the real deal, coffee made from the beans that have passed through the bowels of the cat, would be impossible to obtain with certainty, unless you took a plane ride, located some scat around a small plantation, (It'd have to be a small one, larger ones pick their berries before they are ripe, and the Civit won't eat unripe berries,) and brewed it yourself. Just in case you decide that this is the mission for your midlife crisis, the Wall Street journal Article provided a recipe:

First, dry them in the sun for months, until the outer skin flakes off. "There's no need to wash them," Mr. Yen says, though some people do. Then mix the beans with butter, salt, a little sugar and a dash of "fine French red wine," and slowly roast them for hours over coffee-tree wood.

In any case, I'm sure it won't be the last time we see the civit cat coffee story.

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¹This happens so often now. Sometime I should write about the difficulties that Construction Companies used to have in driving traffic to their business sites. The term "This page is under construction," had hopelessly polluted any internet search by a consumer for a construction company.(This has since been solved by Yahoo's idea of Indexing search results.)

²The best link to the original Reuters story was on Al-Jazeera. "Al-Jazeera, We bring you beheadings, and coffee."

³The URL used to be: http://www.si.edu/natzoo/coffee.htm (Now a redirect to tthe main page.)