How do you think, what is the most expensive and elite coffee is made of? Do you think it is made off some special kind of coffee? Not at all – it is made of some digested coffee beans, that come out from the bowels of a rare animal from the kin of viverras.
It is spoken about a famous kind of coffee called “Kopi luwak”, which has got no competition in rarity and price (320 – 400 $/kilogram). This coffee comes from Indonesia, it grows in Java isles, in Sumatra and Sulawesi. “Kopi” means “coffee” in Indonesia, and “luwak” means a small animal, a kind of tsivetta from a kin of viverra.
Luwak is a small predator and it lives on trees. Also it likes coffee beans very much, besides it chooses only the ripest and the most fragrant. This coffee – lover had been considered a vermin until someone decided to make big money on it.
The point is that Luwak eats much more coffee beans that it can digest. Undigested coffee beans which “travel” through the whole digestive system of Luwak are being processed by its enzymes and come out “in a natural way”. As a result the taste of the beans changes.
The natives diligently collect undigested coffee beans of which the most expensive coffee in the world is made.
This is the way of producing “Kopi Luwak”. Despite the unusual origin of this drink, the makers swear that it comes to all the quality standards. This sort of coffee has a caramel shade and smells like chocolate.
As the scientists consider, it is unlikely that this sophisticated sort of coffee can be produced artificially in further future.
The researcher from Gvelve university (Ontario province, Canada), Massimo Marcone get interested in reproducing this effect that tcivettas make with coffee. He started to search another place in the world where simultaneously were coffee and tsivettas, and found himself in Ethiopia, in the motherland
of coffee.
In the “Food Research International” magazine M. Marcone describes the way he made some coffee from the beans that were personally collected by him from the excrements of African tsivetta and compared it with Kopi luwak. M. Marcone discovered that in both cases the digestive activity of tsivettas brake up (decomposed) proteins which during coffee beans contained. Thanks to that reast process the taste and the fragrance (aroma) of coffee intensifies. Some proteins are being totally washed from the beans, that is why the produced coffee has got a less bitter taste.
But “Kopi Luwak” is not so easy to copy, as Markane reckoned: thebowels of Indonesian cats decompose proteins much better than the digestive system of Ethiopian tsivettas.
However, M. Maaicone found out also, that a slow procession caused by bacteria and enzymes in bowls of tsivettas is alike with the enzymes method of coffe procession which is not as “wet process”. Even the same substens is used in that process – Laktobakcillus.
The biggest part of Kopi Luwak is traditionally exported to Japan. Recently a small of the coffe got the USA and excited native experts of coffe market. Same of them considered this information first as a practical joke, but then they took a bit to try and, in general, were contented.
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