Selling for an astronomical $1,500 a kilogram in New York or $50 a cup in Hong Kong, Kopi Luwak is the world‘s rarest, most expensive and most fabled coffee.
In fact it‘s so rare that many believe it‘s a myth.
ABC Foreign Affairs Editor Peter Cave‘s recent journey to the side of a volcanic mountain in Sumatra to track down the brew confirmed that it is indeed real, even if the majority of what is sold as Kopi Luwak is in fact highly diluted or simply fake.
The thing that makes Kopi Luwak unique and prized is that every bean is plucked from the dung of the Common Palm Civet or Luwak, a weasel-like animal which stalks the coffee plantations of Asia at night feasting on only the ripest and best coffee cherries.
Brothers Susanto and Joko Basuki learnt to love the unique taste of Kopi Luwak as children when all the coffee crop from the mixed plantation of rubber, peppercorns cloves, vanilla and cacao went to government buyers. Poor farmers made do with the beans left behind on the forest floor in the droppings of civets.
Civets themselves are becoming increasingly rare. They are regarded as both a pest and a delicacy by the farmers of Sumatra who have been trapping them for years. Their numbers were further diminished when they were identified as a source of the deadly SARS disease a few years back and a concerted effort was made to wipe them out.
The brothers though have persuaded their neighbours that the dung is a valuable commodity and have offered to buy any civets that are trapped to form the nucleus of a small community of domesticated Luwak they keep in a sort of battery civet farm.
Their efforts in breeding the animals in captivity have been less than successful however. Each time two are put in a cage together it usually ends in a fight to the death.
‘Valuable dung‘
Susanto says his dream one day is to buy enough land and to fence it as a free range Luwak sanctuary where the animals are at liberty to roam and breed at will and to drop their valuable dung anywhere they want.
When the time comes to test the brew it is prepared in the traditional way. The coffee beans are sorted from the nuggets of civet dung by hand before being carefully washed and then roasted in a ceramic dish over an open wood fire.
They are then mashed to a powder in a wooden mortar and pestle and stirred into a cup of freshly boiled water.
They resulting coffee is gritty. The aroma is smoky and pungent and even somewhat reminiscent of its immediate origin but the flavour is unique, mild and smooth with a hint of rich dark chocolate and secondary notes of earth and musk.
Is it worth the astronomical prices it brings overseas? Probably not, but the experience of tracing it to the source has been priceless.
Source: abc.net.au (18 September 2007)
