Gourmet Coffee: Something a Little Different

By Sirena Van Schaik

Gourmet coffee tends to have a range of prices and quality. There are gourmet beans that are offered at grocery stores that are only a step above the regular coffee you would buy in a tin there and there is the coffee that is so rare and flavorful that they only make a few hundred kilos a year.

If you are a coffee connoisseur, then you are probably more in the opinion of drinking the more exotic, high quality coffee. It is, after all, the best coffee available and it is filled with wonderful aroma and taste. There is nothing wrong with you if you prefer the higher quality coffees and nothing wrong with you if you don’t. It is simply a matter of taste.

And that is why Kopi Luwak is a matter of taste. If you are scratching your head over that name, it may be because you have never heard of it. Kopi Luwak is, in fact, one of the rarest coffees out there.

It is a coffee bean that is native to Indonesia and it provides the coffee drinker with a rich experience. In fact, many who have drunk the coffee has described it to being one of the “most unusual coffee flavors around.” The bean is said to have an “earthy taste” that is very heavy in body but also has a clean aftertaste. It also has a very unique aroma that can be very delightful.

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it, and the fact that less than 250 kilos of coffee beans is harvested every year, makes it even more interesting. But why is there such a low yield to this coffee? The simple answer is that the harvesting process is as unusual as the clean aftertaste left by the coffee.

In Indonesia, there is a local pest to the yearly coffee crops. This is the Asian Palm Civet, a small marsupial that thrives in Indonesia, and some other areas of the world. The Asian Palm Civet is almost like a racoon from North America and it will spend its days foraging for food, which can range from berries to bird’s eggs. A favorite dish of the Asian Palm Civet is the coffee berry. For this reason, every year as the coffee plants begin to produce berries, the Asian Palm Civet is there eating up as many berries as he can.

You may have guessed where I am going with this by now but let’s finish the description of the harvest anyways. From this point, with a belly full of ripe coffee cherries, the Asian Palm Civet let’s its stomach perform the magic. Somewhere, from the time the little mammal swallows the coffee berry to the point where he excretes it, something happens to the coffee bean in the stomach.

It is believed that enzymes in the Asian Palm Civet’s stomach helps to break down many of the proteins that cause the bitter taste found in most coffee. What is left behind is a delicious blend that is earthy and unusual.

When the Asian Palm Civet finally excretes the coffee beans, the beans are completely intact with a layer of berry mucous surrounding them, providing a barrier from the excrement. All that is left to do is to collect the excrement and remove the beans from the coffee to finish the harvest.

Although this way of harvesting can cause some people to shy away from the coffee, many people are interested in trying something that is so completely unusual and rare.

If you find that you love rare coffee and the more unusual, the better, than this is definitely a coffee for you.