About Kopi Luwak

Speaking of Kopi Luwak, coffee lovers have probably heard of it at least once. However, it is rare to see a store that sells Kopi Luwak. Our store does not sell Kopi Luwak, and will not do so in the future.

First of all, there are Kopi Luwak specialty stores in Japan, so if you are interested in trying it, I recommend searching for them. They go to great lengths to import high-quality Kopi Luwak, so if our store were to sell Kopi Luwak, we would do business with a company like this.

Returning to the main topic, an importer that we do business with announced that they would no longer be handling Kopi Luwak. I forgot when. At the time, I thought, "Now that I think about it, there have been problems with Kopi Luwak due to lack of quality control, with counterfeits being distributed, so I guess that's part of it," but it seems that the problem is quite deep-rooted.

The first is about the treatment of civets. The original Kopi Luwak process involves letting civets roam free in coffee fields, eating fully ripe coffee cherries, and then washing and refining the excreta. However, this method was not enough to ensure a significant amount of production, so some producers started building facilities to keep a lot of civets and feeding them the harvested beans. This method came to be called caged to distinguish it from the original method.
Civet cats kept in cages can be raised in unsanitary conditions in some facilities, which can pose a problem from the perspective of animal cruelty.

The second point is that, contrary to the theory that Kopi Luwak gets its unique flavor from fermentation inside the civet's body, a paper has been published stating that the flavor actually comes from the terroir and has almost no effect inside the civet's body. I've been searching through literature databases for this paper, but at the time of writing I have not yet found it. (Most of the papers I found raised issues such as animal cruelty.)

Because of these issues, I believe that if we are to sell Kopi Luwak, we should not do so unless there is solid traceability and quality control in place, and if the flavor is actually the same or even inferior to other Indonesian products simply because civets were involved, then I believe that we should sell the Indonesian product.

The price of coffee is determined by the balance between supply and demand. The SCA rating is a way to correct that, or at least to allow the price to be determined by the original flavor (or so the store manager thinks). Our store will continue to select and provide our customers with products that are inexpensive but of high quality.