oddlight

The $50 a cup of Coffee ~ Kopi Luwak

COFFEE has always had its connoisseurs, people willing to pay over the odds for a cup of Jamaica Blue Mountain or a splash of Green Tipped Bourbon beans from St Helena, a reputed favourite of Napoleon's during his exile on the island.

But rarely has there been a boutique brew like kopi luwak, whose price tag of $1500 a kilogram, or about $50 a cup, makes it the most expensive coffee in the world.

"It's really the Grange Hermitage of coffees," Rob Forsyth, of Forsyth Coffee, says. "It's got a nice sweet, rosy, floral kind of flavour, very delicate and smooth."

Forsyth, who sells 300 grams of kopi luwak a year, says its price is a reflection less of its quality than its scarcity. It's thought that just 500 kilograms of the stuff make it to market every year and only then after a highly unorthodox journey to the cup.

Kopi luwak is made from coffee beans that have been eaten and excreted by the Asian palm civet, or luwak, a mongoose-like mammal native to the jungles of South-East Asia. The flesh of the coffee cherry is digested, but the bean passes through intact and is deposited in piles of scat that are collected by hand from the jungle floor.

Fans of kopi luwak claim that enzymes in the stomach of the civet (whose diet also includes other fruit, insects, small mammals and reptiles) enhance the bean's flavour by breaking down the proteins that give coffee its bitter taste. "It's incredibly smooth and chocolatey," says Albert Taylor, whose Mandailing Kopi Luwak has just been launched in Australia. "When I give people a cup they sit there for about half an hour afterward running their tongue around their mouths savouring the sensation."

An Australian living in Indonesia, Taylor owns and operates a 200-hectare plantation in the Mandailing Highlands in north-western Sumatra. He bought the land in 1998 and began growing the original arabica coffee strain introduced by the Dutch in the early 18th century, as well as another relatively new arabica variety.

Taylor began collecting kopi luwak in 2002, following a chance conversation with a friend in Bali. "He told me about this civet cat coffee that was selling for $US600 a kilo. I thought he was pulling my leg. And then I clicked, thinking, 'So that's what all that cat poo around my plantation is."'

Taylor says there are problems in the industry as people have put civets in cages and force-fed them any old variety of coffee beans.

Jennifer Murray, a specialty roaster in Western Australia and member of the Australasian Specialty Coffee Association, recently visited a plantation in Bali where caged civets were being fed robusta beans.

"The whole operation looked a bit dodgy, to be quite frank," she says. "And when we tasted the coffee we were disappointed. It was nothing special but that might have had something to do with the beans the animals were eating."

Taylor says the civets on his plantation enjoy a veritable smorgasbord of excellent beans, "which makes all the difference".

Then there is the issue of authentication. At present there is no internationally accepted method of verifying whether a bean is kopi luwak. "People come up with these Indonesian authentication certificates," Taylor says. "But they are worthless and that's ruining the industry, too. We are looking at verification through a lab in Switzerland that we've sent samples to, to try to identify a print for the bean that will work as an industry benchmark. At the moment, people really don't know. The aroma is distinctive, amazingly sweet, but to an untrained nose it's harder to tell."

Questions of quality aside, kopi luwak has been good news for coffee lovers and the industry, Forsyth says. "It's made a major contribution in making coffee drinkers aware that different coffee beans are not simply region specific - there are a variety of bean types and processing methods that really do affect the final result brewing in your cup. It's also whetting consumers' appetites for exploring the different qualities that come from each bean."


For Mandailing Kopi Luwak stockists, see www.mandailingestate.com.au