Business idea: lab grow the gut microbes of these monkeys and create more efficient pipeline for fermenting these coffee beans. But provide the “natural” offering too for people who have eating ass food fetish.
The problem is that it doesn’t actually taste good. It’s the labor-intensive and “exotic” manufacturing process that makes the coffee so expensive, not its quality.
I’ve seen many more coffee folks who have opinions ranging from “it doesn’t taste different than the local coffee” to “it tastes downright bad”. James Hoffmann has a good video on it: yewtu.be/watch?v=pkbuFwHnJQY
Primary thing seems to be the quality of the coffee cherries the civet eats. So if it’s just force-fed coffee cherries, it’ll be no better than normal coffee. If it gets to choose on it’s own, naturally, then it may pick better coffee cherries and the coffee may be better - but not because of the digestive process, most likely.
I’ve had it farm fresh in Bali and at a swanky cafe in Penang. The shared characteristic was how smooth it is. Tastes different, not necessarily better or worse. Depends on what you’re after in your beverage.
In Penang, we had it with a normal espresso to compare. After drinking the Luwak coffee, the espresso lost all it’s flavour… It did something to our sense of taste!
Going through a factory you can tell there’s no chance the poop makes it to the final product. In fact, none of the cherry meat is used, only the bean, so I question what effect the digestive process has. Maybe the preparation method is different? I haven’t been to a normal coffee factory to compare.
The conditions the Luwak are kept in vary wildly, apparently the worst practices are in Vietnam. The Luwak are super cute , amazing fur, ones kept as pets were fun to interact with. The size of two house cats. Nocturnal, so I’ve only seen them active once.
I liked the coffee but not so much that I want to support demand for it. The Luwak is a totally unnecessary step in making what is already a great beverage regardless.
I’ve been to one of the places and drank it. The coffee was nice but I’ve never chosen to have it again. The animals seemed happy enough, certainly nothing alarming happening. I’m sure they might prefer to roam free but you could say that about pet cats too.
