The biggest problem: the civets are held in catastrophic conditions. Cages as big as shoe boxes. Just for shitty coffee. I hate humans.
(german source: https://www.peta.de/themen/kopi-luwak/ )
(english source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-24034029 )
They didn’t used to be, but once there was a demand and market for shit coffee then they capitalised.
I remember reading an article by the guy the that brought attention to it saying how much he regretted it.
[food] comes from [animal]!
learn more
[animal] is subjected to the most horrific conditions imaginable to produce [food].
yeah, that’s usually how it goes.
I had the opportunity to try this when I was in Indonesia. The place I was at was a cafe advertising the most expensive coffee in the world, I think it was approximately USD$30 for a cup at the time (almost 10 years ago).
I remember seeing the example cages with civets inside them and a description of how it’s made (plus a conversation with a friend I was travelling with), and decided not to try it.
Do you remember where in Indonesia that was? I visited one near Bandung not realising what this coffee actually was. Bit like you I left without trying or buying. The place was a visitor centre and we weren’t allowed to look at the actual farm.
Well hey, lucky us, we’re about to find out if I’m a lier! I just spent 30+ mins digging through photos. Is this a civet?
It’s not geotagged, it was taken with an average 10 years ago digital camera, but based on the photos taken at the same time, it’s in the general area of Borobudur, but not actually at that temple. My best guess is near Prambanan. Possibly we stopped somewhere on the taxi ride from one to the other.
I don’t think we went to Bandung, or at least I don’t remember stopping there. My memory is fuzzy but I think we drove from Jakarta to Yogyakarta so must have at least passed nearby. The place wasn’t an actual farm though, just a place serving the coffee with an example civet outside.
Blimmin heck! Appreciate the effort in digging that photo up! It doesn’t sound like the same place though.
I’ve done a similar journey in the past and there’s places to stop everywhere. Even in a jungle in north Sulawesi at night, middle of no where, some fella selling durian in a cabin next to a dirt road.
This is covering a few experiences across Indonesia. We stopped at a frozen food shop which had 2 lions in small cages. Stopped at a private collector to see the world’s smallest primate (which I can’t remember the name of now) to find chimpanzees in cages bearly large enough to hold them. Driver stopped at a village which was ravaged by a volcano and people rebuilding their houses, asked if we wanted to stop to take pictures. Asked if we want to visit a wet market selling dog meat. Mid 2000’s, driver asked if we wanted to stop by at the scene of the Bali bombings for photos. Went to a turtle sanctuary to find them baking in bad conditions. Went to a coral reef to find some of the worse plastic pollution I’ve personally seen. Don’t even start me on Jakarta! Although that pace is improving in recent years
Place is crazy. Total lack of consideration for animals and people, unless religion or culture is involved, then the rules are strict. I got in trouble once for handing money over with my left hand.
Totally different to what I’m used to! Place is nuts.
From the wikipedia page:
Within the coffee industry, kopi luwak is widely regarded as a gimmick or novelty item. The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) states that there is a “general consensus within the industry…it just tastes bad”. A coffee professional compared the same beans with and without the kopi luwak process using a rigorous coffee cupping evaluation. He concluded: "it was apparent that luwak coffee sold for the story, not superior quality…Using the SCAA cupping scale, the luwak scored two points below the lowest of the other three coffees. It would appear that the luwak processing diminishes good acidity and flavor and adds smoothness to the body, which is what many people seem to note as a positive to the coffee.” Professional coffee tasters were able to distinguish kopi luwak from other coffee samples, but remarked that it tasted “thin”. Some critics claim more generally that kopi luwak is simply bad coffee, purchased for novelty rather than taste. A food writer reviewed kopi luwak available to American consumers and concluded "It tasted just like…Folgers. Stale. Lifeless.
You don’t need to do a scientific evaluation to determine it is worse. It’s literally shit water. You are drinking shit.
Sometimes bizarre methods like that do come out tasting great. So good idea to test
Taste doesn’t matter. You are consuming shit.
Good tasting shit though.
What comes out of that animal on the photo doesn’t look to different from what went in. So my guess is, you’ll just get ordinary beans mixed with some civet intestine lining and stomach acid and whatever else they ate during that time.
I’ve had it a number of times both in the states and in SE Asia. It’s different but it is really good. Like yeah it is a different coffee and if you judge it to the same criteria as a coffee style that it isn’t, of course it will fail. If a “good coffee” needs to be aggressively acidic with strong notes of papaya, pineapple, Maracuja…this is not that. It is very smooth and subtle and that is what makes it nice and different.
Don’t forget blueberry. You have to be able to taste a hint of blueberry. Did you taste blueberry? Because if not, your extraction process has gone horribly wrong, you’ve bought the wrong beans, you’re using the wrong water,and you probably bloomed for 32 seconds instead of 29.6.
Lul fuggin spot on.
Another part of the equation is that civets were very particular about the cherry beans they ate, so only the best beans at just the right time were eaten and shit out.
Well after it started becoming known as good tasting, people started capturing and feeding the civets crappy cherry beans that weren’t at the proper ripeness instead of gathering the shit from out in the wild where the civets got to be particular.
So now, if you buy it, it’s “shit tier” civet shit beans.
Indeed, if acidic etc. is what they like they can fuck right off. Of course it is better without!
The last sentence would literally describe Palo Alto coffee that isn’t shat out of an animal.
I think modern coffee is judged by how much the tastes reflect its distinct characteristics, which includes physical characteristic of the farm (altitude etc), fermentation process, and roasting process.
It takes a lot of work to produce good coffee, and the end result should let these efforts shine. Acidity, fragrance, and funk are great ways to communicate the life of the coffee to the taster. That is why they are typically the standard to determine good coffee, instead of generic and monotone"smoothness" that is shared across kirkland signature, peets, starbucks, and gas station coffees.
I read that what happened is that the workers on the coffee farms weren’t allowed to get coffee for themselves, so they started using these coffee cherries, but then, of course, someone had to take that away from them too so it could be monetized.
…and then, in the natural course of things, snobby douchebags convince themselves that the crappy product they’ve taken from the plebs is better than the original. Poopbean coffee is just the lobster of the 21st century.
And because it’s expensive people have abused these poor animals just so they can sell the coffee.
I got a tour of the place where they proudly show these cats in the most horrible conditions. Also, it doesn’t even taste good.
You tried it!?
My boss bought some a few years back. I tried it, honestly a not a bad cup of coffee if you ask me. But I would never pay for it myself.
Similar situation, tasted it, it was pretty good.
Yes, it tastes a bit earthy to me.
Incredible how humans always find ways of abusing more animals.
I assumed you were full of shit about this being abusive but then I looked it up and oops
The moment an animal is involved in the process of making money they are bred, caged and treated only as “good” as needed so they stay alive.
We’ve done the same with people… Fuck capitalism and all its sociopathic sycophants.
humans are animals too so we’ve not really progressed that far
Why would you ever assume an animal agriculture practice wouldn’t be abusive?
The bees seem kinda chill about it. They can just kinda fuck off after all.
Not sure where the debate is this moment but from my understanding, vegans won’t eat honey.
I won’t speak for other vegans, but my research into beekeeping and honey production turned me against the industry for the following reasons:
- Beekeepers will commonly clip the wings of queens to keep them from swarming or leaving.
- Semen is commonly extracted from bees by crushing them.
- Honey taken from hives is commonly replaced with a nutrient-devoid sugar solution, affecting the health of the bees.
- Selective breeding of honeybees has made them more susceptible to diseases which can also affect native insects.
- Honeybees have been shown to cause serious disruptions to plant-pollinator networks, putting local pollinators at great risk.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/
Thanks for the bullet points and link, comrade.
I have a cousin who’s vegan and I was legit curious about this, and she literally said exactly that - “the bees can leave if they want”, but from what I understand there are other vegans who disagree
Beekeeping is a real problem, especially since it became a new hobby for some people. It’s advertised as helping to save the bees but in reality the honey bees are not in danger. They are the danger - to wild bees and other local insects.
Thats a seperate matter from animal abuse though, also I live in a region with lots of orchards (or atleast used to have) so bee keeping is just kinda a factor.
Yes it’s not abuse but still a man-made problem for animals, which is why I mentioned it.
You can still get kopi luwak that’s solely from wild civets–rather than captive–but the price is astronomical. I think that the last time I looked it up–more than a decade ago–it was something like $150+/pound.
“This coffee tastes like shit!”
“It is shit, Austin.”
“Oh good, then it’s not just me.”
lol, wanted to make sure this was here.
Thanks.
I remember reading that wild animals just eat the best cherries, it has nothing to do with the digestion. The caged animals are just making shit beans.
A big part of this story is that the civets are very picky and only eat the best coffee cherries. There might of course also be other factors, but the pickiness is key.
I have tasted it. Not the shit, mind you, but the coffee brewed from the beans. It was coffee. Nothing special. Not even a bit nutty.
Not the shit
I would hope it’s not
there is a lot of kopi luwak fraud, so it’s possible you drank any old coffee and paid out the ass for it. an idea why kopi luwak presumably tastes so good is also that these civets have a very varied diet that enriches the coffee a lot, but caged civets are fed exclusively coffee beans and therefore the coffee won’t even taste very good, so even if you did have real kopi luwak it’d probably taste underwhelming.
I have no doubt about the fact that it was legit stuff. The beans were bought from a reputable vendor and brewed at a reputable cafeteria. It was different for sure, but nothing that would swoon you.
The whole thing is based on the speciality of the way the beans are produced. They sell an image of excellence and rarity, but in the end it’s just coffee.
If you’re thrifty like myself you can eat the beans yourself for a homemade version
So I have a story related to this. I teach English in Korea. One time, two 11-year-old students chose kopi luwak as a topic for their in-class (no research) project. I asked what that is, as I had never heard of it. They explained in pre-intermediate English that there is a cat that poops coffee beans. I didn’t believe them at first, because it sounded so silly. But they urged me to look it up. At first, I got confused between ‘kopi’ and ‘coffee’, because Korean has no ‘f’ sound and substitutes a ‘p’ sound. But when I finally found the Wiki page, I was blown away. The fact that this is real would be so funny if it weren’t for all the abuse another user pointed out.
Wild civit cats would usually cherry pick the best, well, cherries (beans) . Thereby ensuring a quality product. Nowadays they are captive and fed any old beans which means the quality is usually quite poor. I mean it still tastes OK, a bit sour, but I certainly don’t support this cruel practice.
FINNALLY
LITERALLY SHITPOST
Literally a shitpost.
it would have cost you nothing to not share this with us
I think it’s important to know that humans treat these animals like absolute shit to literally drink their shit that doesn’t even taste good, but it’s expensive
Rich people have more money than sense. We should make them pay their taxes to help with this…
