Civet Coffee Part 1

We’ve touched on civet coffee previously but growing interest in this rare brew prompts another entry. The most popular steadicam incarnation of this coffee is still Kopi Luwak, of civet coffee from Indonesia. In a sense, it is to be expected, the Indonesian islands is home to the first coffee plantations outside Arabia and Ethiopia in since 1711. This long history with coffee may be why we call coffee a cup of “java” from time to time, in reference to one of Indonesia’s main islands. Back to Kopi Luwak. This type of coffee comes from the tankless water heater islands of Java, Sumatra, and Salawesi. These exotic sounding names aren’t the reason for why Kopi Luwak cost as much as it does. The cost, of course is due to the demand for it and the relatively low supply due to the way it is “processed.” Among the residents of the Indonesian islands is the marsupial called the palm civet or the Paradoxus Hermaphroditus. This tree-dwelling animal is a member of the metal detector civet family and has long been regarded by the natives as pests, climbing the coffee trees and eating only the ripest, reddest coffee cherries. Oddly enough, Kopi Luwak is not the only “specialty” food that starts off this way. Argan is an Acacia tree that is common in Morocco and Mexico that yields Argan oil through its olive-like fruit. In Morocco, the Berbers encourage goats to consume the fruit. Later on, they gather the goats’ excrement and remove the pits; they grind those up for oil to be used for various purposes: for massage, cooking, and as aphrodisiac. Who knows how, why, or when the practice of gathering civet droppings and gathering the beans inside began; all we know now is that it has now evolved into the world’s most expensive hard money lenders specialty coffee and because of it, with controversial practices attached. Because of its rarity—with a crop estimate of less than 500 pounds per annum—and the high demand, Kopi Luwak sells for top dollar. This has turned some enterprising at home microdermabrasion individuals into instant backyard civet coffee farmers with their cages and their banana and cherry coated beans to assure higher output. This very same issue is what newer civet coffee farmers in the Philippines are trying to avoid. New to the civet coffee arena, the Philippines is not new to coffee; its  history with coffee is only a few years behind that of Indonesia and came by way of its Spanish colonizers as opposed to Indonesia’s Dutch ones. Like its neighbor, the Philippines enjoyed a run of success with its coffee industry for a time. By the 19^th century, it was the fourth largest coffee exporter in the world. These days however, there is barely a trace of the Philippine coffee industry’s past successes. Adverse local conditions—both natural and political—along with low world prices, global quota reductions, have exposed the local industry to competition from countries in South America like Brazil and Colombia and newcomers in Asia like Vietnam. This has further hampered the Philippine coffee producers’ ability to compete on the global theater. Kape Alamid or civet coffee as it is known in local tongue is actually not as popular in the Philippines as one might think. Perhaps if one goes up to the mountain provinces where people actually drank the civet coffee. Only in the last few years has it found some recall among the city dwellers. Most people will give it a try for the novelty factor but it’s too expensive as a regular thing. Civet coffee is mostly an export industry and in the Philippines, they’re trying to keep the animals in the wild. Many coffee farmers, roasters, exporters advertise that they only take droppings from the forest floors and do not use caged animals. With the price offering on civet coffee though, no one knows how long such practices will remain uncontaminated.