Secondhand Beans: The World's Most Expensive Coffee


The ears! The eyes! The nose! This little guy is adorable.

Not only that - he makes some of the most expensive coffee in the world.

Meet the civet. Fuzzy and catlike, these nocturnal little creatures reside happily in the coffee-abundant lands of Southeast Asia. Civets spend their days napping, curled up in tight, cozy balls with friends and family. At night, however, the civets get to work.

I must admit, I do envy the civets for their chosen profession. Work, for them, essentially boils down to the simple act of eating... and, well, the process that naturally comes next.

See, the civets' diet consists almost entirely of one food: coffee. More specifically, they're after the cherry-like fruit that surrounds the "bean". Though a large portion of the region's coffee plants are cultivated and harvested by the civets' human neighbors, wild beans are still plentiful in the jungle, ripe and ready to be eaten by our little furry friends.

What makes these animals such prolific producers of coffee is actually a deficiency in their digestive systems. The civets eat the fruits, bean and all, but their stomachs don't possess the enzymes needed to break the beans down. Instead, the beans sit in their bellies for a while until they start fermenting. Time passes and the fermented beans are expelled naturally. In other words, for my less scientifically-minded friends: beans go in, magic happens, and expensive coffee comes out.

Humans collect the civet droppings, wash the beans, and prepare them for sale. At this point, you're probably thinking, "okay, so it's dung coffee. It can't be that expensive. It's a novelty gift, probably twenty bucks a bag for jokesters to give their friends..."

Nope.

$600 PER POUND.


Image from: Journeys and Travels
Seriously. In some parts of the world, it can be up to $100 per cup.

I don't have $100 lying around to spend on a cup of coffee, so I haven't had the chance to try it. If I did have $100 lying around, I probably still wouldn't spend it on a cup of coffee. But one civet's junk is another man's treasure, or something.

Apparently kopi luwak, or "civet coffee," is considered some of the best-tasting coffee ever made. It's a claim that's sparked serious debate within the coffee community, but there appears to be a general consensus that the coffee is, at the very least, extremely unique. Many who have tried kopi luwak describe the taste as being significantly smooth and chocolatey in a way that is vastly superior to other coffees. Others claim that there is no real difference in the flavor or quality of the coffee, and that kopi luwak is unnecessarily over-hyped. Whatever the case may be, it's still selling for $600 a pound.

Coffee farmers that once ignored the droppings surrounding their crops are now starting to focus all of their attention toward the little cats. Some coffee farms have pivoted completely from cultivating plants to attracting and harvesting from civets.

Unfortunately, as is often the case when humans discover value in an animal species, there are those that subject nature's little coffee-makers to poor and harmful conditions. Some farms rely only on caged civets, keeping the little prowlers away from their jungle homes. For this reason I hope that anyone looking to try civet coffee will do some research to select only the beans coming from non-caged civets. That is, of course, if you have $100 to spend on a cup of coffee in the first place.

I haven't yet asked around, but I don't think anyone here at Fortuna has ever had civet coffee. I'll be sure to update this post with a quick interview if I find anyone that has. We certainly don't roast any of it ourselves, though. If you want civet coffee, we're sorry to say that it's probably the only thing we don't actually have.

So I leave you with this. If you ever find yourself hiking around the jungles of Southeast Asia, make sure to always be looking down. You may just find the coffee equivalent of a hunk of gold laying out in the sun with a little cat creature happily munching berries nearby.

- Griffin Thomas
Social Media & Publications Specialist
Fortuna Enterprises, LLC

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