An Asian palm stew
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Coffee beans collected from civet feces have a unique chemistry that may explain why such beans are prized for their flavor.
Asian Palm Stews (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) are mongoose-like animals native to South and Southeast Asia. Civet coffee, also known as kopi luwak, is one of the world’s most valuable and strangest luxury beverages. A kilo of beans that have passed through a civet’s digestive tract can be worth more than $1,000.
Kopi luwak is produced primarily in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, but it is also made on a smaller scale in other countries, including India and East Timor. However, animal welfare groups are urging consumers to avoid the industry, accusing it of keeping thousands of civets in cages in appalling conditions.
To learn how coffee beans are transformed after passing through a civet, Palatty Allesh Sinu of the Central University of Kerala, India, and his colleagues collected coffee samples from five coffee-growing farms near Kodagu in the Western Ghats mountain range of India.
Civets live wild within these farms and none of the operations keep the animals in cages. Workers routinely collect the beans from the shavings and then add them to the harvest of tree-grown coffee beans. “The places we worked have a harmonious interplay between planters and civets,” says Sinu. “We want to bring facts about the chemical composition to the planters.”
The researchers collected nearly 70 civet scats containing coffee beans and also hand-harvested beans from the plantations’ robust coffee trees before running a series of tests that looked at key chemical components, such as fat and caffeine.
The total fat content was significantly higher in the reed beans than in those harvested from the trees, while the caffeine, protein and acid content was slightly lower. The lower acidity was probably due to fermentation during digestion, the researchers say.
The volatile organic compounds in the stewed coffee also showed significant differences compared to regular coffee beans. Some of these components, which are routinely found in regular coffee beans, were either missing directly from the civet beans or were only present in minimal amounts.
The team suggests that the higher fat content of civet coffee may contribute to its unique aroma and flavor profile, and the lower level of proteins may result in reduced bitterness.
Sinu says caging civets to make kopi luwak is cruel, and the hope is that further work can help develop artificial fermentation processes that result in coffee with an identical chemical composition.
“We hypothesize that the gut microbiome may help in some way in the fermentation process,” says Sinu. “Once we know the enzymes involved in digestion and fermentation, we may be able to artificially make civet coffee.”
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