COFFEE NEWS

How much would you pay for a cup of liquid cat dung?   Quite a lot, if some highly discerning coffee drinkers are anything to go by.

You won’t find kopi luwak at your local coffee shop

On the lush, volcanic slopes of the Indonesian archipelago, villagers “harvest” kopi luwak.

The beans used for the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee have already been munched by cat-like palm civets, and now they are plucked from the dung to be dried and roasted.

Retailing in North America and Europe for up to $600 a kg, kopi luwak, literally “civet coffee” in Indonesian, is not a brew for the faint hearted.

Less than 230kg of it is estimated to be produced a year on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, and war and disease are making it even harder to find.

 

   

“I first read about it in 1980 but didn’t manage to get my

 

hands on any until 1993,” says Michael Beech of Raven’s Brew

 

Coffee Inc.

Until last year, when supplies began to dry up, it

 

was the main supplier of kopi luwak in the United States.

 

   

The kopi luwak bean comes from only three Indonesian islands

His clients have ranged from ordinary java junkies to comedy actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame, he says.

The firm has a backlog of 300 kopi luwak orders to fill at $75 for 114 grams. 

“To be honest, you can’t get $75 worth of quality in any coffee. You are really paying for the experience,” says Beech.

 

  

Fussy eater

The brew has become so rare that a newly published book on

 

coffee in Indonesia, “A cup of Java,” relegates it to legend.

 

“We have failed to find any coffee-seller who admits to

 

actually selling kopi luwak from the faeces of the civet cat,”

 

write authors Gabriella Teggia and Mark Hanusz.

 

To many Indonesians, the term kopi luwak has come to mean

 

simply the beans which the civet - a notoriously fussy eater

 

which selects only the ripest coffee cherries - would choose.

 

The war in Aceh province made kopi luwak even more rare

“We just use the name for branding, but we don’t trade in it,” says Jeffrey Susanto, whose family runs the Kopi Luwak string of gourmet coffee shops in Jakarta.

 

The rarity of kopi luwak is confirmed by Nugroho Bintang Satrio, the Central Java chief of the Indonesian Coffee

 

Exporters Association.

 

  

“Only a tiny portion of small-holders are left who collect it,” he said, adding that traders buy it at about 11,000 rupiah ($1.30) a kilo, about twice the price of ordinary robusta.

 

   

Deadly harvest

In the last year, a government offensive against rebels in

 

rugged Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra has also

 

cut into supply. “Farmers get killed if they harvest the coffee

 

too far into the bush,” said one trader.

 

Then there is the bad press caused by the deadly flu-like

 

SARS virus.

Civets, which are not cats but are related to mongooses, have been slaughtered in their thousands in China and imports banned from many Western countries for fear they carry SARS.

 

“Even if SARS was associated with the coffee itself, by the

 

time it’s collected and washed there is a very long period that

 

has elapsed,” says Massimo Marcone, a food scientist at the

 

University of Guelph in Canada, who has carried out extensive

 

tests on kopi luwak and deemed it safe.

 

Producers are working on an elephant poop variety

Yet, despite all that, some still harbour doubts.

 

   

“Sumatra, in the popular imagination anyway, is just too close to China and I’m just wary of the whole SARS thing,” says Beech, adding that Raven’s Brew may cease to offer kopi luwak.

 

   

“We are working on an elephant poop coffee,” he says with a chuckle, explaining a plan he vows is serious.

The idea is to feed coffee to tuskers at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka and sell the product, farming the proceeds back into the orphanage.

 

   

“It will be a do-gooder coffee, pooped out by bonafide orphan elephants,” Beech explains.

 

According to some experts, a bean that has been partly digested tastes special.

 

   

“What I did find with kopi luwak was that the acids, the gastric juices and the enzymes were actually getting inside the bean and breaking down the proteins,” says Marcone.

 

   

“You start getting amino acids. When these things are heated during roasting, they react with other components and they create certain flavour compounds different from other beans.”

 

   

Exotic processing

So what does the world’s most pricey coffee taste like?

 

Pure unadulterated coffee beans, undigested by any animal

Coffee buffs say it depends on whether the civet has been

 

eating arabica or robusta beans.

 

   

“Initially people thought it must be the best coffee in the world, but I have to be honest about it, it’s a crappy cup of

 

coffee,” says Beech of the robusta variety.

 

   

No matter how exotic the processing, it is mostly robusta cherries the luwak munches.

That fact is a legacy of the coffee blight which in 1878 destroyed every low-lying arabica plant from Ceylon to Timor, allowing Brazil and Colombia to take the lead as the world’s main suppliers of arabica.

 

   

Weeks of phone calls around Indonesia results in a fragrant mailbox containing a brown envelope from an East Java coffee

 

trader. Inside is 250 grams of brown gold - kopi luwak arabica.

 

   

The aroma is rich and strong and the beans oily. Ground and

 

steeped in boiling water the flavour is, well, much like any

 

other coffee.

But the experience lingers in the memory.

Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/English/Archive/Archive?ArchiveID=2966

 

For those who love the full flavor of real coffee but can’t handle the kick, the genetics revolution may have a solution.

Researchers say they have genetically engineered coffee plants that have 70 percent less caffeine than usual in their leaves. The crucial question for brewing coffee — whether beans from those plants will have less caffeine — won’t be known for three to four years when the plants mature, said study author Shinjiro Ogita.

However, the results indicate it should be possible, according to the researcher’s report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The researchers at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan used RNA interference — an increasingly popular genetic tool — to manipulate the plant, interfering with the gene responsible for an enzyme used to make caffeine.

Experts contend a caffeine-free bean would be an improvement over current decaffeination processes, which use water or organic solvents to remove the stimulant from the beans before they are roasted, taking out some flavor and aroma as well.

Alan Crozier, a University of Glasgow researcher who has worked on genetically modifying coffee, said the Japanese group is the first to engineer the plants to produce less caffeine.

However, concerns about genetically modified foods and a lack of interest by the coffee industry could slow development, Crozier said.

“I suspect it will come in first at the boutique end of the market and grow from there,” Crozier said. “If it were to take over, clearly it’s a much cheaper way to produce decaffeinated coffee.”

Pablo Dubois of the London-based International Coffee Organization, which includes coffee-producing and consuming nations, said genetically modified foods “are regarded with wide suspicion in Europe” and current decaffeination processes are well established.

John Stiles, a scientist working to develop a caffeine-free coffee plant for Waialua, Hawaii-based Integrated Coffee Technologies, said the Japanese researchers have not yet reached the commercial decaffeination level of 97 percent.

Stiles said the Hawaiian company hopes to have plants ready for field use in a year. While the Japanese researchers used the robusta variety of coffee plant, Stiles said the Hawaiian work uses the more commercial arabica variety.

Ogita said the Japanese researchers are also working on arabica plants and should be able to eventually remove all caffeine.

Coffee plants make caffeine in a three-step process. The targeted gene in the modified plant normally prompts the plant to produce an enzyme that carries out the second step, said Hiroshi Sano, one of the paper’s authors.

RNA interference eliminates the chemical messenger the targeted gene sends to the cell’s protein-making machinery.

The researchers are also working to induce plants other than coffee to produce caffeine, which would act as a pest repellant, Sano said.

At the Daily Grind in Baltimore, some welcomed the news of the genetically modified coffee plant and others were as lukewarm as a half-finished cappuccino.

Marcia Sternbergh, 52, of Baltimore said she prefers regular coffee for the taste, “and the jolt.”

At night, though, she would drink the non-caffeine kind.

Harold Cones, 60, of Newport News, Virginia, who has to drink decaf because of an irregular heartbeat, said he would welcome the new coffee because he could avoid caffeine and get the flavor.

“Oh, that would be good. There’s a difference,” Cones said, sipping a decaf. “Every now and then I have a cup of real coffee and it’s really nice.”

While some decaf is good, Cones said it tends to get stale because it’s not ordered as much. The real thing is still the best, however.

“Sometimes, you get that cup of coffee,” Cones said, “and you think you’re high in the mountains, in an old hotel, and the aroma goes up into your sinuses and you say, ‘That’s a good cup of coffee.’”

Source:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/06/59302