Civet Cat Coffee

Civet cat coffee, known in its original language as Kopi Luwak, is the world’s most expensive coffee. This coffee is famous for its unique method of processing: passing through the digestion tract of the catlike civet. The civet cat eats ripe coffee cherries and, after it has digested the fruity pulp, excretes the coffee beans. Civet cat coffee took the international coffee market by storm and has gone from relatively unknown to a gold mine of specialty coffee. Since it was first discovered in the 19^th century, kopi luwak has become both internationally acclaimed and reviled.

Origins

Kopi Luwak’s origins are rooted in the Dutch occupation of Indonesia. the Dutch East India Company began exporting coffee in the late 1600s and the Dutch colonies of South East Asia quickly became a major world exporter. To increase the amount of coffee they were able to export they forbade Javanese and Sumatran farmers from picking coffee to personally consume. According to legend, the farmers instead began combing through the droppings of the civet cat for undigested coffee beans. The farmers would dry, roast, and brew the beans, making a coffee with a uniquely smooth flavor that lacks the bitterness of most coffees.

When the Dutch colonists discovered how good the coffee was, demand for it began to rise. Thus Kopi Luwak first started its journey to becoming an expensive gourmet coffee. It was difficult for producers to keep up with demand due to having to scour coffee plantation areas for civet droppings and then clean and process the wild Kopi Luwak. The low supply and high demand encouraged producers sell normal coffee and lie about its origins. Lack of transparency in the Kopi Luwak trade temporarily killed the industry.

Kopi Luwak Today

In 1991 Kopi Luwak reentered the specialty coffee scene. That was the year a man named Tony Wild as coffee director of Taylors of Harrogate, first brought a small amount of kopi luwak to the west. The repulsive charm of coffee from poop worked wonders with the press and public. The exotic coffee gained international fame and became a sought-after commodity. Prices for this coffee can fetch up to $200-400 per kilogram.

Kopi Luwak in various stages of processing

Kopi Luwak’s production method originates in Java, but other islands have adopted it over the years. The islands of Sumatra, Sulawesi, Java, Bali, and East Timor all process and export this coffee. In fact, the amount of people willing to buy over-priced novelty coffee is enough to fund the creation of multiple Kopi Luwak knockoffs starring various animals willing to ingest and excrete coffee beans. In other places, people have capitalized on the selling value of animal-processed coffees and developed their own versions. Elephant, bird, and monkey coffee are all being created and sold by people hoping to ride the market’s inclination towards coffee processed by animal digestion. China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, and many other countries are all selling their own take on this expensive coffee.

The Taste

The surprising popularity of coffee taken from animal droppings can be explained by its taste. Kopi Luwak is praised for being smooth, sweet, and earthy. It has hints of caramel and chocolate and is often drunk without sugar or milk. It is said digestive enzymes of the civet remove some of the coffee’s bitterness and create a flavor that coffee connoisseurs with money to spare consider delicious.

In truth wild civet cats were free to sample the coffee berries as they wished and only ate the ripest, freshest berries. Workers forced to strip pick the berries, on the other hand, were far less exacting than a wild luwak. Kopi Luwak was also more effectively processed than standard methods back then. The civets’ digestive system gets rid of all of the cherry’s pulp much better than processing methods of the time were able to.

The specialty coffee industry today, with its exacting standards on plant health, cherry selection and processing methodology has equaled and surpassed any flavor variances from commodity coffee that Kopi Luwak originally possessed.

The State of the Industry

Despite any amazing taste Kopi Luwak may still possess the production process is cruelty to animals. Civet cats are omnivores who may feast on coffee in areas where the weather is colder and damp. They are nocturnal and solitary, not meant to be in close quarters with each other. Mass production of Kopi Luwak has led to caging and force feeding them diets of mostly coffee cherries. Unlike the coffee berry borer a civet cannot digest the caffeine in coffee beans. A poor, overcaffeinated diet combined with cruel conditions makes the animals stressed and unhealthy. A caged luwak used to produce Kopi Luwak rarely lives more than a couple of years.

Some few companies do actually get their coffee from wild civets, but that requires a large amount of effort to track down the creature’s droppings. Such a large amount of effort to gather a small amount of beans is what racks up Kopi Luwak’s prices to up to $3,200 per a kilo. Even companies that do not actually allow their civets to roam wild feel justified in charging such exorbitant amounts for their Kopi Luwak.

The Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture has done research in creating artificial Kopi Luwak. Muhammad Syakir, the head researcher, stated that they are artificially replicating the civet digestive process through fermentation. They have managed to isolate the civet’s probiotic microbes and use them to create a coffee with an identical flavor to classic Kopi Luwak. This discovery, however, came in 2016 and as of yet artificial Kopi Luwak is not on the market.

Opinions

We do not sell factory-farmed kopi luwak at Bright Java. It goes against our goals of providing reliable, traceable, quality coffee with a positive social impact. The civet coffee industry is based on a manufactured delicacy, and most of what originally made it special is gone. The third and fourth wave coffee movements which focus on picking ripe beans and effective processing methods has already replicated what made Kopi Luwak unique. Kopi Luwak fell out of favor because of fraud rife in the industry. Many farmers claiming to sell Kopi luwak were in fact selling conventional coffee. This remains the case added with those who claim to sell only “wild” civet coffee.

Kopi Luwak is, frankly, a tragedy. People still pay outrageous prices for it, even despite the likelihood that the coffee they are buying was created through animal cruelty. If you want to get good coffee, simply buying specialty sourced beans is more likely to guarantee you a good cup, and you will be supporting an industry that doesn’t run on animal cruelty.

Occasionally we are able to find a source that we believe is truly wild, and for a very high price, we do include some of it in our export shipments.

Coffee’s Greatest Predator

The Coffee Berry Borer

The coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei, is the coffee farmer’s greatest enemy. This millimeters-long beetle, also known as CBB, lives in almost every coffee-growing country in the world. Armed with its ability to completely digest caffeine, the CBB wreaks havoc upon coffee crops.

The beetles burrow into coffee cherries to lay eggs, which hatch and live inside the beans until they emerge to lay their own eggs. Coffee beans have a natural safeguard against pests in the form of the greatest chemical compound ever discovered: caffeine. Caffeine normally acts as a pesticide to prevent creatures from eating the coffee plant, but the coffee borer can actually live entirely off coffee beans, unaffected by the caffeine due to special bacteria in their guts. The coffee has no defense against them, and they can destroy between 50 to 100 percent of the cherries on a plantation by the harvest time. Many studies have been undertaken to reduce the economic damage of CBB on coffee crops the world over.

CBB in Indonesia

CBB is rampant in Indonesia, and is one of the causes of the low productivity compared to other origins. For example coffee yield in Brazil is 1,600 to 1,800 kg per Hectare whereas Indonesia produces 700-760 kg per Hectare. One of the main ways for farmers to get rid of CBB is clear all the berries off their trees after the harvest. But in Indonesia’s mild climate multiple harvests take place throughout the year. There are almost always cherries on the trees and some varieties bear fruit year-round. One of the difficulties in controlling the spread of CBB in Indonesia is due to the nature of small holder farmers being the major source of production. Even if one farmer was able to manage their trees well enough to prevent spread, their neighbors may not. Due to the close quarters small holder farmers have with one another, CBB can easily spread from one plot of coffee trees to another.

We have personally suffered great losses from CBB. In 2018 coffee we had stored in a warehouse that must have been slightly out of moisture specifications had latent eggs hatch. By the time we could get this warehouse infestation under control we lost a good deal of our coffee. Later on our roastery warehouse was infested when we brought in a sample of green beans from a new farmer with poor management practices. We managed to halt the spread of the beetle to any of our other coffees, but it was a very upsetting experience.

Prevention Methods

The Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute is studying ways to help Indonesian farmers control the pest’s spread. CBB has few natural enemies, and most of these threats to them are not even found in Indonesia. One natural enemy of CBB in Indonesia is the white muscardine fungus . Naturally occurring in soil, once infected it grows inside the beetle’s body and can kill within days, destroying its internal organs.

Some studies have explored destroying the beetle’s ability to digest coffee by attacking the bacteria in its digestive tract. This decreases the eggs they produce by 95 percent and completely stunts their growth. However, there is not yet a mass-produced spray or antibiotic that targets these beetles. Some Indonesian farmers are taking preventative measures by controlling the humidity of their farms. If they co-crop their coffee with plants to shade it, the humidity will affect the life cycle of the beetle.

There are other possible methods to prevent CBB from taking over a field. Indonesian farmers have been using traps to halt the spread of the beetle. The Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute has studied the use of simple traps made out of water bottles in cutting down the beetle’s numbers. The traps are baited with a substance called Hypotan, which smells like coffee and attracts the beetles. It is now being mass-produced and sold to farmers in various regions of Indonesia.

These are only a few methods, but it helps to do everything possible to halt coffee’s most dangerous predator. Our goal is to help our farmers produce the maximum amount of good coffee, and we hope to do so by sharing as much knowledge about CBB control as we can. We are doing our part to fight this scourge through showing farmers effective ways of preventing and killing off this beetle before it can destroy any more coffee.

The Challenges of Organic Certification

Western consumers increasingly prefer to buy products certified as Organic and/or Fairtrade. This inclination stems from increasing concern about the conditions under which food and agricultural commodities are produced. Organic certifications serve as assurance that products are produced with minimal amounts of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. Ethical certifications such as Fair Trade, Utz and Rainforest Alliance require environmental, social, and economic sustainability as well as standards for workers and farmers’ well-being. However, working daily in the coffee industry leads us to ask a question about which the consumer is at times oblivious. Are these certifications actually beneficial to small holder coffee farmers?

Let’s run the numbers on certification using a co-op of growers typical to the ones we work with. This co-op may consist of up to 50 families/farmers each holding 250 coffee trees on their own plot of land. For the initial certification the co-op would have to pay 1000-2500 USD, plus travel of the certifying party, mitigation costs if any findings have to be corrected during the certification period. In the following years the co-op must pay with a re-certification fee of what may be 1000 USD per year. For the small holder farmers organized in such a way, such a large outlay of money is not financially feasible. Smallholder farmers need capital to build processing stations, replace aging and unproductive trees with new seedlings better suited to their geographic location, buy better fertilizer, and attend agronomy training so that they can produce coffee that is worth more. A consistent annual drain of money just for a certificate to state that they are being treated fairly or growing without pesticides would be more of a handicap than a benefit.

Larger co-ops, like those comprised of hundreds or even thousands of growers, and for-profit corporations are best positioned to take advantage of certifications. While in some situations, small holder farmers can form large co-ops that are actually able to finance certificates, it is still not an advantageous move for most of the growers we work with. With the money drain involved, only at large scales or with large amounts of working capital do certifications make sense.

Despite the lack of official certification, coffee by small holders may many times be grown organically. This is due to the simple fact that sometimes farmers are not able to afford the inputs needed to maximize productivity. We have come across smallholder farmers that do absolutely no tending to their trees and just harvest whatever ripens every year. Sometimes we run across coffee growers who have intercropped with other plants that need fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides. For these, shifting to a monoculture coffee farm would deplete the soil and is not a sustainable option for these farmers. The best option for us in finding well-grown, not chemical saturated coffee is to work community by community, teaching better production methods with the end goal of foodstuffs free of chemical input.

When it comes to organic and pesticide-free, the certifications are moot for the roasted coffee consumer. Studies show that any volatile organic compounds that remain on the green bean are burned away in the first few minutes of the roasting process. You can read more about in two studies, one conducted in Germany in 1984 and the other conducted in Japan in 2012. The person who most deserves our concern is the farmer and residents of the growing regions who are exposed to the chemicals directly.

Mitigating the amount of chemicals that farmers work with is one of our goals. We strive for a direct relationship model that goes beyond what buyers think of as a direct trade or farm gate model. While our hope is to have all of our partner farmers using organic fertilizer and compost on multi-use permaculture plots that produce varied cash crops and food products, that is just not yet reality for most of our farmers. Part of our vision is to start with farmers where they are at right now.

We partner with them to increase capacity where needed and provide expertise. One village near us that we work closely with contains about 30 farming families that process their own coffee at varying quality levels. We buy all of their coffee which meets our high quality standards and are able to sell all of it on the local market, earmarking the profits to be reinvested in this village. The goal of that money is to buy processing equipment and set up a real wash station with them so that all the farmers in this village can reap the benefits of growing high-quality coffee. The money that could go to obtaining a certificate is doing better work, helping the farmers grow coffee that is better for both them and the people who buy it.

While we do not, at this time, offer a coffee that has a cool green and white logo on it, or a frog, or a bunch of letters, we offer what we think is much more. When you buy Bright Java coffee you help ensure that there is someone working at origin, making long term positive impact in the livelihoods of small holder coffee farmers in Southeast Asia.

Social Impact

We strive to become an internationally competitive company with a holistic impact on the global coffee supply chain. We want to positively impact our customers, the farmers we work with, and the communities we find ourselves in.

Our goal is to reach coffee growers on remote Indonesian islands and help them advance economically, environmentally, and socially. We hope to provide a trustworthy channel for farmers to sell their coffee at good prices and educate them in ways to sustainably grow great coffee.

Indonesia is unique in the coffee growing world in that over 95% of its coffee is grown by smallholder farmers. These households may just have a handful of trees or an entire grove on a plot of less than three hectares. Because of this unique situation up to as many as 2.33 million households in Indonesia work in the coffee industry.

We visit islands across Indonesia to find farmers who grow good quality coffee and buy from them. Engaging in a working relationship, not a one-time purchase, provides farmers with the finances they need to undertake more sustainable, environmentally beneficial ways of growing. When we enter an exchange with a community, we do more than just buy. We educate the members of coffee-growing communities who want to learn more about quality coffee, enabling them to advance their farms and their communities without our direct involvement.

We are an entity for social good like all businesses should be. But we are not a charity or an NGO. Rather than focusing on helping communities through direct action, we aspire to give farmers the tools they need to flourish. We focus on giving a hand up, not a hand out. At Bright Java, we hope to encourage farmers to develop in ways that benefit both their coffee and the farmers themselves.

We train willing members of coffee communities in the best systems of growing, tending, and harvesting. These methods set precedents for better coffee practices in entire communities, benefiting more than just the people we teach. We save profits from our coffee sales to teach farmers how to build and implement better processing equipment, enabling them to produce better quality coffee that will bring them higher prices. We assist communities in forming cooperatives, so that they can output more coffee and have greater bargaining power.

Our company realizes that when we engage in a coffee trading relationship, we are engaging with people, from smallholder farmers, to large importers, to roasters, cafes and hotels seeking direct trading relationships. Our desire to benefit others and build good relationships with both our producers and customers takes precedence over the profit we make.

Arabica Coffee

There are two varieties of coffee trees commonly used around the world: Robusta and Arabica. Arabica is the high quality variety that is most sought after and most difficult to grow. Robusta is so named because of its resistance to disease and can grow at lower altitudes. Its bitter beans have twice the caffeine of Arabica and a much harsher flavor – think, acrid burning tires. (In fact, it’s the extra caffeine that gives it the harsh flavor as well as deters insects.) If you are buying coffee at a supermarket, it’s probably Robusta. Some farmers are starting to grow premium quality Robusta, but it doesn’t have the flavor range of Arabica making it still a lower value product.

Arabica trees produce fewer cherries, which must be picked more carefully; Arabica can only grow at altitudes above 3000 feet. Yet the flavor of Arabica beans is smooth, aromatic, rich – and worth all the trouble.