For a long time, Kopi Luwak coffee was the most expensive variety in the world, which is associated with a very difficult way to extract it — through one natural, natural mechanism, which will be discussed later. The name Kopi Luwak comes from the name of a small animal of the viverrid family — musang, which is called “luwak” in the local Indonesian dialect. The word “save” is consonant with our “coffee”, so it’s easy to guess that this is how it is translated.
What do coffee beans and a small predatory animal the size of a squirrel have in common? The answer is simple to the point of banality — coffee berries are a favorite delicacy of musangs, and the peculiarities of their digestive system relieve the grains they eat from bitterness.
The next logical conclusion will also hit the mark — yes, this is exactly how one of the most expensive coffee varieties in the world is created) Animals are fed with delicious berries, and they “endow” the breadwinners with “improved” coffee beans, though in a slightly dirtier form than originally.
In these photographs, you can follow the production process of Kopi Luwak coffee — the collection and selection of berries, the feeding of animals in special enclosures. The digested coffee berries are separated from the excrement, washed, dried and lightly roasted, after which they go on sale. Initially, due to the difficult process of “production”, it was possible to extract no more than 100 kilograms of Kopi Luwak grains per year, but today this popular type of coffee is already produced on special fur farms on an industrial scale.
The cardinal difference between coffee produced in this way is that the musangs, in the wild, regaling themselves on the most delicious coffee berries, painstakingly looking for them on the branches, in captivity feed on “anything”. Of course, all the berries fed to the animals kept in the enclosures are also selected coffee cherries, hand-picked on the plantations of East Java, but only in the natural environment, the musangs are able to select the most delicious fruits — as a result, the coffee produced on such a fur farm is inferior in taste qualities of grains extracted from the excrement of free-living animals.
Speaking about the fact that today Kopi Luwak is one of the most expensive varieties of coffee, it is worth noting that he lost his palm quite recently — in 2012, with the advent of even more expensive Black Ivory, produced according to the same “system”, only by means of elephant digestive tract.
