News

This one’s a bit of a perennial. It’s true, that there is a breed of wild cat in Indonesia that apparently eats coffee beans and then excretes them, only for someone following behind to extract the undigested beans for an ‘out of this world’ coffee experience.

Some say that it tastes of caramel or chocolate. Others describe it as earthy and musty. Whatever the flavour, connoisseurs are happy to pay a lot of money to savour a single cup of luwak coffee.

It’s now being marketed in Australia by Allan Sharpe and his wife, Michelle Heritage of the Heritage Tea Rooms in Hervey Bay as ‘the world’s rarest and most exclusive coffee’. According to Mr Sharpe, ‘People who willingly pay the $50 are uplifted by the thrill of the experience.’

Every month about a dozen people sample the café’s luwak coffee. One taster was quoted as saying: ‘This is the kind of coffee you renounce your religion and sell your child for.’
Customers are rewarded with a ‘certificate of experience’ as a memento. Gift boxes of luwak coffee, also imported from Indonesia, include the animal’s droppings wrapped in plastic, which the Sharpes say are treated with gamma rays by quarantine officials on arrival in Australia. The beans, which are gathered from forest floors by hand and initially resemble slabs of peanut brittle, are cleaned and lightly roasted. The boxes, including 250g of coffee and the droppings encased in plastic, retail at $160.

According to the article, orginally published in the Times, it is not known when the first cup of luwak coffee was brewed, nor how the first cup came to be brewed from their excrement. Annual world production is believed to be only about 300kg,with a market price of about $1100 per kilo.
Guelph University in Canada is one of the few institutions to have studied the make-up of luwak coffee beans. Its scientists found them to have less protein, a lower bacterial count and some pitting on the surface compared with the popular Colombian variety. This may explain why luwak coffee was less bitter and had a more attractive aroma.

Still, it seems like a lot of money to pay for what some people unkindly refer to as ‘cat-poo coffee’!

Coffee News from around the World of Coffee (Winter 2007)

Reports have come in that coffee trees which are naturally free of caffeine are about to be brought into Australia for the first time. Linda Jacques, a coffee grower from Mareeba in Far North Queensland, has secured the rights to bring the first natural caffeine-free coffee trees into the country. The trees were apparently discovered by Brazilian scientists in Ethiopia some years ago and Jacques says she will bring them in once they are cross-bred with a higher yielding strain.

Currently, caffeine is extracted from coffee beans via a chemical process [injecting with carbon dioxide at high pressure] or through treatment with hot water, but both of these methods affect its taste. Theoretically, naturally caffeine-free coffee beans are the ideal solution, as they would give a full-flavoured espresso, without the caffeine hit. (ABC News Online)