Is Indonesian Civet Coffee Good? How to Distinguish Authentic Lakun Kopi Luwak from Fakes

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FrontStreet Coffee's Indonesian Luwak Coffee Introduction

On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, there exists a tree-dwelling wild animal called the "luwak" (civet cat). The local farmers typically consider finding "luwak" droppings as a gift from heaven, because not all "luwak" feces can be luckily found.

Once a few such "coffee beans" are found, locals will bend down to pick them up, carefully collect them, and then through several processes such as selection, drying, deodorization, processing, and roasting, create a rare, unique, and expensive coffee.

Civet coffee (Kopi Luwak) is made when luwaks select mature, sweet, plump, and juicy coffee fruits from coffee trees as food. After the coffee fruits pass through their digestive system, only the fruit pulp is digested, while the extremely hard original coffee beans are excreted unchanged. People extract the coffee beans from their feces for processing.

Due to this special production process, many people may not accept civet coffee. The reality, however, is quite the opposite.

It is precisely because luwaks eat mature coffee fruits and excrete the coffee beans through their digestive system that the coffee beans can undergo gastric fermentation, producing a coffee with a distinctive flavor.

This digestive process brings about unparalleled magical changes in the coffee beans, resulting in a unique flavor with moderate body and acidity, gentle aroma, and earthy notes. The taste is particularly fragrant and mellow, with a rich, rounded sweetness that cannot be compared to other coffee beans.

This is because the luwak's digestive system breaks down the proteins in the coffee beans, significantly reducing the bitterness caused by proteins while enhancing the rounded mouthfeel of these coffee beans.

Characteristics of civet coffee: The special flavor comes from two sources: (1) the unique body odor of the luwak itself, and (2) the digestive process consumes a large amount of sugar. The body odor is quite distinctive and unavoidable. As for the impact of sugar consumption on taste, less sugar means less bitterness formed during caramelization in the roasting process. Being both specially fragrant and not bitter, many people find it delicious. Being delicious yet scarce makes it expensive. This is also why many people use masked palm civets to substitute for luwaks to produce what is claimed to be civet coffee. They have similar body shapes, making it easy to pass off as genuine.

In summary: Luwaks feed on coffee berries as their staple food during the bean maturation season. After complete digestion, the sugar content is consumed, and the beans in the feces lose their stickiness. The coffee beans do not stick together; once excreted and dried, they quickly disperse into individual particles in a sparse distribution.

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