Counterfeit Kopi Luwak Is a Big Problem – And That’s Not a Bunch of Civet Crap

But Maybe, Just Maybe a Solution is at Hand

The difficulty in trying to follow the progress in solving the major problems of the world is that there are just too many of them.  One has to be selective or else be overwhelmed.  But no matter how busy a person is, there should always be time to consider the issue of whether or not people are making counterfeit Kopi Luwak and what to do about it.

For those who don’t know about this, it turns out that Kopi Luwak is an $80.00 cup of a bunch of crap.  Really it is.  We are not making this up, we are not that clever.

The look on this civet's face - priceless

Brown-gold blend

A way to test the genuineness of the world’s costliest coffee

THE most expensive coffee in the world is s**t. That is not an opinion, it is a fact. To make Kopi Luwak you must, of course, start with high-quality beans. But then you have to feed them to palm civets, wait while they pass through the animals’ guts (having their fleshy exteriors digested as they go) and be ready to collect them when they come out of the other end. The result, when cleaned, fermented, dried, roasted, ground and brewed, sells for as much as $80 a cup. The reason for this apparently ludicrous price is the sublime effect on the beans’ flavour of the chemical reactions they undergo in a civet’s stomach.

So since there are people in the world willing to pay $80.00 for a cup of coffee made from beans in the excrement of civets, something else we didn’t know, it seems that there is a lot of false Kopi Luwak out there.

Given that price, a lot of counterfeit and adulterated Kopi Luwak gets peddled as the real thing. And until now there has been no reliable way to detect it. A purchaser may think from the flavour that he has been duped, but he cannot prove it.

Of course there’s no way to detect it.  If you happen to drink Kopi Luwak and conclude “Hey, this tastes like crap” well that’s a pretty good indication it’s the real thing.  And if you happen to drink some and it doesn’t taste like crap, then when you complain to the waiter “Hey, my coffee tastes pretty good” well exactly what do you want he or she to do about it?  And if they take it away and bring it back and it now does taste like crap, do you really want to drink it not knowing how that crappy taste now got in there.

Apparently scientists are working around the world to solve the problem of counterfeiting this coffee.  And when they do they can then go on to the next issue, which is determining how it is that someone who is stupid enough to pay $80.00 for a cup of crap has the wherewithal to do so or why they should be let loose in society to roam unsupervised.