Please don’t, it is not only a product of colonialism injustice, it is also produced in extremely inhumane manner. To make the matter even worse, the industry consensus is that they tastes terrible.
Within the coffee industry, kopi luwak is widely regarded as a gimmick or novelty item. The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) states that there is a “general consensus within the industry…it just tastes bad”. A coffee professional compared the same beans with and without the kopi luwak process using a rigorous coffee cupping evaluation. He concluded: "it was apparent that luwak coffee sold for the story, not superior quality…Using the SCAA cupping scale, the luwak scored two points below the lowest of the other three coffees. It would appear that the luwak processing diminishes good acidity and flavor and adds smoothness to the body, which is what many people seem to note as a positive to the coffee.” Professional coffee tasters were able to distinguish kopi luwak from other coffee samples, but remarked that it tasted “thin”. Some critics claim more generally that kopi luwak is simply bad coffee, purchased for novelty rather than taste. A food writer reviewed kopi luwak available to American consumers and concluded "It tasted just like…Folgers. Stale. Lifeless.
I’ve had it a number of times both in the states and in SE Asia. It’s different but it is really good. Like yeah it is a different coffee and if you judge it to the same criteria as a coffee style that it isn’t, of course it will fail. If a “good coffee” needs to be aggressively acidic with strong notes of papaya, pineapple, Maracuja…this is not that. It is very smooth and subtle and that is what makes it nice and different.
Don’t forget blueberry. You have to be able to taste a hint of blueberry. Did you taste blueberry? Because if not, your extraction process has gone horribly wrong, you’ve bought the wrong beans, you’re using the wrong water,and you probably bloomed for 32 seconds instead of 29.6.
What comes out of that animal on the photo doesn’t look to different from what went in. So my guess is, you’ll just get ordinary beans mixed with some civet intestine lining and stomach acid and whatever else they ate during that time.
I remember an episode of QI where someone brought up the fact that Stephen Fry once bought (then) Prince Charles some Kopi Luwak as a present. His response was, “I thought I would get him something he didn’t already have.”
So I have a story related to this. I teach English in Korea. One time, two 11-year-old students chose kopi luwak as a topic for their in-class (no research) project. I asked what that is, as I had never heard of it. They explained in pre-intermediate English that there is a cat that poops coffee beans. I didn’t believe them at first, because it sounded so silly. But they urged me to look it up. At first, I got confused between ‘kopi’ and ‘coffee’, because Korean has no ‘f’ sound and substitutes a ‘p’ sound. But when I finally found the Wiki page, I was blown away. The fact that this is real would be so funny if it weren’t for all the abuse another user pointed out.
