Is civet coffee worth the price?
Executive summary about healthy coffee drinking By Tim Hayward
Superlatively expensive, kopi luwak coffee is famously prepared for roasting by passage through a civet cat. Have you ever tried a food with a legendary reputation, and was it up to snuff?
Reiss is a 'coffee person' par excellence. He takes coffee so seriously that he roasts and blends beans to order for individual customers, so when he asks me to try something I do. Civet coffee is variously marketed as 'cat-poo coffee' or occasionally 'the most expensive coffee in the world'. The reason it's so costly is that, rather than harvesting the coffee fruit (known as 'cherries') and extracting the bean by the usual methods, some Sumatran villagers collect the faeces of the civet cats which live on the plantations and pick out the beans. As a rare and luxury product with great story attached, civet coffee - 'a great gift for the foodie who has everything' - tends to get packed into tiny little sachets, stored for ages and sold as a gimmicky gift and is as a result almost guaranteed to taste - well to be brutal, a bit like shit. Worse, according to industry gossip, up to 40% of the product sold as genuine civet coffee is nothing of the sort. It would be easy to conclude that civet coffee was just another of the world's great 'stunt eating' experiences. Civet coffee producers have recently begun to set their little gatherers loose on Arabica rather than Robusta beans. My bag was intended for opening this morning, coincidentally, my birthday. If cat-shit coffee is ever going to taste good, today is the day.
To be a bit technical, the coffee brews faster than my regular blend on the same grind and produces a less oily shot with a pink tint to the crema. On first taste it's pretty fantastic with all of the higher notes you tend to get with a well-roasted bespoke coffee (regular civilian drinkers, myself included, seem to see coffee in terms of big, bassy low-end flavours and smells). Will civet coffee replace my regular blend?Yeah, right! Of course I love the idea that it's been through a cat, For food lover. what it the best coffee in the world?
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