Coffee "Luwak" - the most expensive and controversial coffee in the world

Coffee "Luwak" - the most expensive and controversial coffee in the world
Coffee "Luwak" - the most expensive and controversial coffee in the world
Anonim

Are you willing to pay 30 or even 50 dollars for just one cup of coffee? This is how much the most expensive coffee in the world, Kopi Luwak, costs. Such a high price is due to the complexity and laboriousness of the production process of this variety. No more than 270 kilograms of real elite Luwak coffee are received per year. The cost of one kilogram of grains ranges from $400 to $1,500.

expensive coffee
expensive coffee

To drink this very cup of Luwak coffee, you need to be a person not only rich, but also unsqueamish, because the process of processing beans is quite peculiar.

Coffee trees for this type of coffee grow on farms located on some of the islands of Indonesia - Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi. In addition to trees, these farms contain small animals with sad eyes, similar to cats - musangs, or palm civet. In the local Indonesian dialect, they are called "luwak" and "kopi" is coffee. The name came from these two words.

Musangs eat the ripe fruits of coffee trees - coffee cherries. In the digestive tract of the animal, the pulp surrounding the coffee beans is digested, and the beans themselves are saturated with enzymes and come out unchanged. Farm workers collect animal excrement, dry it, separate preciousfruits, washed thoroughly, dried again in the sun, and then lightly roasted so as not to harm the original aroma. Until the moment when people realized that coffee beans processed by luwaks could be used to make a drink, they considered these predatory animals to be pests.

luwak coffee
luwak coffee

The gastric juice of musangs includes civet, which gives Luwak coffee a special bright taste. Coffee lovers and connoisseurs - real coffee lovers - say that the taste of Luwak coffee is balanced, with a slight bitterness, hints of chocolate, nougat, honey and butter. The drink leaves a stable long and pleasant aftertaste. By the way, in your home country you can drink a cup of Kopi Luwak coffee for only five dollars.

coffee kopi luwak
coffee kopi luwak

Wild musangs are very picky animals, sort of coffee gourmets. They select only the best, ripest coffee berries. To attract wild musangs to the coffee farm, farmers leave baskets of berries lit by torches at night for them. Animals can select only twelve grains from a kilogram. In the morning, workers collect animal droppings.

On Luwak coffee farms, the animals don't have that freedom of choice, they have to eat the coffee beans that the owner gives, which is why the quality of the drink is somewhat reduced. This explains the fluctuation in the price of a kilogram of Luwak coffee: "wild" costs much more than "farm". But to reproduce the process of fermentation of grains in an artificial way, without the participation of animals, the producers of Kopi Luwaknever succeeded.

The high cost of coffee is due to several facts. Firstly, each musang eats about one kilogram of coffee berries per day, and the output is only 50 grams of Luwak coffee beans. Secondly, the enzyme necessary for the processing of grains in the gastrointestinal tract of animals is produced in their bodies only six months a year. In order not to feed the animals idle for half a year, farmers release them into the wild, and then catch them again. Thirdly, in captivity, musangs do not breed; their population has to be increased at the expense of wild individuals.

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