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Civet coffee: why it's time to cut the crap
- Nate75Sanders 13y agoFirst I ever heard of this stuff was from Olin Shivers' page: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/martinez.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/martinez.html his general page: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/ I don't think it's changed much in about 15 years
- codeulike 13y agoThey need a free-range or wild standard I guess
- nonchalance 13y ago"free-range coffee"
- stephengillie 13y agoThe chemical and mechanical processes of the luwak digestive system could be duplicated. I don't know (and don't want to know) the effect of gut flora on the beans.
- audreyt 13y agoA viable alternative may be in-vitro fermentation: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2013/02/19/370638/Taiwan-to.htm http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/20... There was a marketing campaign earlier this year in Taiwan around the animal-cruelty-free process.
- sliverstorm 13y agoI can't help but think you'll see the same thing as with diamonds. Inventing a lab process will just make the original cat-process even more prized, because suddenly it's not just "rare" but it is also "authentic". Basically, it doesn't seem like this is a technical challenge. It's a social challenge.
- shaneofalltrad 13y agoI don't know, you could recreate a process that falls under a model, similar to micro-brews. Then you attach clean and good for the environment. This would be the next big hobby, and better for you than that cool cigar humidor, or making of beer.
- troels 13y agoMaybe so. I wonder though, if it's cheaper to produce it synthetically and impossible to tell the difference in the final product, wouldn't those people who produce it now (out of greed) be very tempted to use the synthetic process, but still claim that they use the "authentic" one?
- throwaway9848 13y agoNo need. People need to just stop drinking this mediocre and overpriced product and learn how to make perfectly serviceable high grade arabicas taste good. I doubt most people that purchase the coffee even know what Gold Cup standards are. http://www.scae.com/scae-gold-cup-programme/how-the-gold-cup-works.html http://www.scae.com/scae-gold-cup-programme/how-the-gold-cup... Kopi Luwak is - outside of novelty purposes - a ridiculous status symbol for rich idiots, like using ground-up, ineffective rhino horn to treat erectile disfunction.
- TheAceOfHearts 13y agoThis seems very similar to wines. I like coffee and I like wine, but my only metric for whether one is good or bad is simply if I like the taste.
- throwaway9848 13y ago"You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises, and again essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the cellar stairs, and then say to you that the racket I had made was philosophically on a par with The Magic Flute, this would not be the beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satisfactory and complete response on your part would be,'I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did.'" -Kurt Vonnegut to his brother Bernie, excerpted from Timequake (Which is to say, I agree with your point, and just wanted an excuse to quote the most entertaining paraphrasing ever of 'to each his own')
- sliverstorm 13y agoThat's not even "good" or "bad", just "taste". I personally gravitate to dry reds, particularly within a certain price range- too cheap and you can't taste the grapes, too expensive and you can't taste the alcohol- but that doesn't mean whites are "bad".
- rjett 13y agoAmen! Kopi Luwak has the inherent marketing advantage of describing the production process in a one sentence, narrative hook that everyone understands. Even non coffee drinkers know about "that coffee where the weasel poops it out." That aside, modern experimental coffee processing techniques, varietal classifications, and terroir's effect on taste and quality is far more interesting and productive with regards to pushing the envelope for specialty coffee.
- Create 13y agoCoffee fermentation is already a very well understood operation: this is partially why high quality beans are a commodity item (ie. selection of microbe strains). It is also a food safety issue, so you have lots of attention from authorities too (including the UN). The rest is just a branding a pricing exercise (along with roasting, which is also a well understood process). The whole trading process is not unlike trading Brent barrels and selling them through different oil companies and stations. Ask Nestlé.
- mathattack 13y agoI would think that there has to be a synthetic was to get the same effect.
- benatkin 13y agoIn the short term I think this article is going to have the opposite effect of what's intended. It seems inevitable that everyone must know about Civet Coffee before resources can be gathered to protect the animals regardless of the demand. Better sooner rather than later.
- stephengillie 13y agoI don't know that the article will increase demand. I know my personal demand for this coffee has gone from middling (I hadn't heard about it before the article) to zero on hearing that it's made from the poop of an animal that can't digest coffee beans. I don't know which I find more disgustingly appalling -- that people are choosing to, paying very much to drink "pooped-bean coffee" -- or that the animals which play a crucial part of this process are so cruelly treated. But at least the latter can be compartmentalized with the inhumane conditions of our other food animals.
- benatkin 13y agoA lot of people want to try exotic food just for the sake of it, and civet coffee is appealing because it sounds gross at first glance but not so gross after looking into it. Not all poop is the same, these cats aren't carrying around diseases and they don't eat a whole lot of different things. So people imagine that it will impress their friends, while at the same time consuming it isn't a painful experience.
- Dylan16807 13y agoEver had cheese or alcohol? Now that is poop. The part you should be emphasizing is "can't digest". These beans aren't poop as in digested material, they're taking a ride in poop. It's not really worse than the standard method of mixing poop into the dirt where plants are grown.
- ianstallings 13y agoWhat on earth..
- pault 13y agoIt's actually quite good. Imagine coffee without the bitterness or acidity. The taste is somewhere between coffee and unsweetened cocoa.
- lucisferre 13y agoA solidly brewed quality coffee can produce the same effects and should have minimal bitterness or acidity. The technique and beans are what matter. I'm pretty skeptical about the pooping.
- throwaway9848 13y agoAgreed. I think that that most people that would like Civet poop coffee would find this good: buy a Hario, prepare one cup at ~1.5 times average strength, toss it, and brew a second cup from the previously extracted grinds.
- pault 13y agoA double-blind taste test would be very interesting, but in my experience the kopi luwak is noticeably less bitter and acidic than the least bitter and acidic solidly brewed quality coffee I've had :) It's worth a try if you've never had it, at least.
- fennecfoxen 13y agoIt sounds like the original format, where you let the wild critters themselves choose the coffee berries instead of feeding them in cages, is likely to have produced a superior product.
- peterwwillis 13y agoNo, you're 100% right, the claims are bullshit. Less proteins in the coffee bean = less flavor. http://sprudge.com/say-no-to-kopi-luwak.html http://sprudge.com/say-no-to-kopi-luwak.html
- peterwwillis 13y agoThis is one of those moments where I learn something I had no idea about, and am very glad someone wrote the Guardian story, and that someone posted it here. I bought the civet coffee off ThinkGeek for a coffee snob friend of mine years ago. She said it tasted watery and bland, but thanked me for the thoughtful novelty anyway. Now I realize I not only gave her crappy coffee, it was crappy coffee created through abusing animals for a stupid gimmick. I feel like an asshole.
- pdenya 13y agoAt least you learned about the treatment and now won't buy any more. Seems like better conditions than animals get in most US factory farms and there's plenty of awareness campaigns but they're still in business.
- javajosh 13y agoDon't beat yourself up too badly. How were you supposed to know? It's hard for an individual consumer to understand the full impact of his purchase decision in the aggregate and over long periods of time. As a rule, consume what you want more of in the world. (The exception are naturally rate-limited goods, like fish or wild animal droppings, or absolutely limited goods, like fossil fuels.) Consider this: if civet coffee had not ever become popular, then your purchase would have been fine - if anything, you could feel good about yourself since you just injected a tiny bit of cash into a poor area of the world.
- nawitus 13y ago>How were you supposed to know? It's safe to assume all animal products are unethical.
- enraged_camel 13y agoWhat is so unethical about eggs or cow's milk? edit: The point I am trying to make is that not all of our food comes from unethical industrial factory farms. There are a lot of farmers who use ethical and sustainable methods. It is not too difficult to do research and find out how your food is produced.
- sigil 13y agoI tried Luwak coffee last summer in Munduk, a mountain village in north Bali. Honestly: it's nothing special. My girlfriend (a former barista) vetoed it after she saw a caged Luwak, and the huge piles of drying coffee-bean-laden turds that were clearly not the result of gathering. And, obviously, pretty gross. http://m.imgur.com/VNiVTo6 http://m.imgur.com/VNiVTo6 http://m.imgur.com/EIMZbW6 http://m.imgur.com/EIMZbW6
- sliverstorm 13y agoHonestly: it's nothing special. Like many other food-as-status-symbols. It's not about how good it is, but how rare and difficult to procure.
- einhverfr 13y agoIndeed, status symbols generally depend on one criteria, namely the ratio of marketing to availability. Lots of marketing and little availability makes it a status symbol. Less availability and little marketing makes it a novelty. See for example red spinels vs rubies. These aren't food but they show the same dynamic at work. The most famous "rubies" in the world are actually red spinels, but because they aren't marketed heavily they are seen as second class gems.
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- manarth 13y agoOne hypothesis: what if (genuine) civet coffee is so good, because the civets' nose smells out the very best coffee cherries, and only eats the best? Therefore, if it's crapped out the arse of a civet, it was a very good bean. Given that many animals have a superior sense of smell to humans, this hypothesis seems reasonable - civets could smell out the best coffee, and given the choice, who wouldn't want to eat the best? If this is the case, then the whole mass-production/feeding-civits-in-cages is absolutely pointless, because it does away with the civets' selection process. Which might explain why some people describe their purchase as watery and bland.
- _delirium 13y agoThat's definitely one of the arguments used in the marketing material. If the coffee being sold is not in fact from wild civets that can choose the berries, that sounds like it should be considered false advertising.
- stevewillows 13y agoAs with truffles, could we not just train a dog to find these choice cherries and place them in a bin?
- agilord 13y ago> "Which might explain why some people describe their purchase as watery and bland." This is true. The other part of the explanation is that many people just don't appreciate the coffee that is anything different than what they are used too. Just watch someone from the US in Europe drinking an espresso, or the other way around. People have different opinions based on their personal habits, and saying it is "watered down" should mean nothing without context and references.
- sliverstorm 13y agoHah, that makes sense. Of course it tastes bland, when you normally drink coffee with six cubes of sugar.
- crdoconnor 13y ago
- wtvanhest 13y agoI know this is the wrong reaction, but now I want to try it.
- anigbrowl 13y agoTalk is cheap. I kept expecting to read how he was donating some % of his consulting fees/shared profit from the promotion of this luxury into alleviating the problem, but apparently that's not on the cards.
- chengiz 13y agoHe's "raising awareness", of course.
- mrleinad 13y agoAren't we ingenious little fuckers? Always finding new ways to give the finger to other species..
- rotskoff 13y agoThis probably isn't any different from consuming anything that contains animal products from a country with flexible regulation on farming conditions. The description doesn't strike me as being any different from the conditions described for chickens in the U.S. Markets that suddenly emerge often have strange consequences. The demand for quinoa and acai berries, for example, have had serious economic and environment effects in South America. There's not too much that's unique about this case, other than product. Poor conditions for animals and exploitation appear to be the norm.
- 3minus1 13y agoThe fact that this is being done to wild animals seems especially cruel.
- gfodor 13y agoI just got back from Bali and tried this stuff. The place I went to of course said little about the surely terrible environment the animals are in -- they had a few at the place but they were probably just there for the tourists to see. Anyway, the coffee isn't anything great. Yet invariably many of the tourists around me were raving about it, I'm sure not in small part due to the focus on it and the high price it demands. It reminds me a lot of the phenomenon of shark fin soup in Asia -- the soup is mediocre at best, but because of its high price people (in my view) pretend to think it tastes incredible.
- jonny_eh 13y agoThey're not pretending, that's power of suggestion. They believe it.
- gfodor 13y agoGood point!
- rsl7 13y agoI also had it in Bali, a few years ago, and had a similar reaction both there and with the small quantity I brought back.
- peachananr 13y agoIt costed me US$5 for a small cup in Bali and a bunch of other complimentary coffees and teas for free. Did you had the same experience?
- nicholassmith 13y agoI had civet coffee many, many years ago (nearing a decade) and it was a lovely cup of coffee, but not enough to justify the ridiculous price. Now that's become industrialised it's even more awful to consider having a cup, I do hope this helps remove it from the market.
- guiomie 13y agoWe humans are really twisted.
- larsbot 13y agoInstead of buying civet coffee, roast your own beans. I have never tasted coffee as good as the stuff I have roasted myself. All you need is an old popcorn maker. Buy green beans from Sweet Maria's or somewhere else online. It's cheap, easy to do, and the results are amazing.
- talles 13y ago"cut the crap" :)
- rdl 13y agoIt is interesting how luxury goods are very amenable to this kind of campaign -- the "conflict diamond" thing from a few years ago seemed a lot more effective than any number of regular anti animal cruelty or sweatshop labor campaigns. Anti-fur and anti foie gras has also been much more effective than anti-meat.
- malkia 13y agoKopi 2014
- siliconc0w 13y agoSomeone should start a consumer protection type business which offers certification with varying degrees of statistical significance to slap on your products to prove it isn't bullshit. Then we legally mandate you either get the seal or have to put "THIS PRODUCT MAY BE LYING ABOUT ITS CLAIMS" on the packaging. Then it'll be interesting to see how long until the process is corrupted and the certification becomes meaningless.
- jrockway 13y agoThen it'll be interesting to see how long until the process is corrupted and the certification becomes meaningless. "Certified Organic"
- aaron695 13y agoReminds me of the South Park 'Whale Whores' episode. A lot of people who probably are happily eating chicken getting incensed by another culture doing something the same to a slightly different creature.
- nilved 13y agoWhat if you don't eat chicken either?
- frogpelt 13y agoIt's time for free-range, coffee-eating kopi luwak farms!
- raintrees 13y agoThis is a bit thematic, but maybe we could get Jellyfish to eat the coffee bean cherries? Two problems, one answer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347557
- gcb0 13y agoI sense someone just got a deal with a farm that can actually ship a ton per year of the real stuff and is now working his way into a certification program. Certified civete coffee anyone?
- ghshephard 13y agoIf it makes any of you feel better (from an ethical perspective), I've heard that a large portion of the "Civet" coffee that is marketed has never seen the digestive tract of that nocturnal animal, and is simply regional coffee beans branded at a much higher price. It's the coffee equivalent of Kobe Beef (which, if you've purchased in the United States, probably wasn't actually from the Tajima breed of Hyogo wagyu cattle in the Hyogo Prefecture)
- JacobAldridge 13y ago"Wild Crap Coffee" - as a descriptor of the Civet industry's marketing, the broader fecal caffeine industry instigated by the author (Tony Wild), and the brand name for his suggested loop-closing product in the final sentence - has a ring to it.
- njharman 13y agoViva la free market!
- mfieldhouse 13y agoDisgusting how there's scumbags out there who jump at the chance to make some quick money, even if it means destroying the lives of others.
- fatjokes 13y agoCopy and pasted from the article: " I was the one who started it all ... I first read a description of kopi luwak buried in a short paragraph in a 1981 copy of National Geographic Magazine." So... he didn't exactly start it. He just popularized it to the affluent western audience.
- gcb1 13y agoyour point?
- ballard 13y agoA proper luxury product should debase the consumer, ie, "LoJack for luxury handbags" that would adapt radio tags for monitoring wild animals to the task. (Sans Civets.)
- cfontes 13y agoI've been to one of those farms when I was in Indonesia. They only showed me a single one of those animals in a big cage, but I can be sure there were more from the amount of coffee avaliable to sell in their "Rural store" I've bought one cup of it for U$5,00 and it's stupid. The coffee tastes wierd and seeing that animal in that cage was enought to make me leave the place with a felling that I was doing something really wrong paying for that coffee. I try hard to never buy this or any other kind of super cool variants of cheap things. Especially if they are from a 3rd world country because ( I am from one ) I know that there is nothing in those countries with power enought to stop any wrong doing. In those places governement and agencies just don't care about animal safety, public health and so on.
- wanderr 13y agoThere's a local startup here that produces coffee supposedly with the same enzymes produced by the cats. I think this might be them: http://coffeeprimero.com/ http://coffeeprimero.com/ I've tried it before and I have to say, it's not bad...but not really for coffee lovers either. At least if the bitterness is at all part of what you enjoy about coffee, this stuff is pretty bland and boring. The fact that they only sell it ground is another hint that it's not really meant for coffee lovers.
- jsilence 13y agoThe leading vietnamese coffee company Trung Nguyen analysed the natural process and was able to reproduce it without animals. I tasted both and was not able to tell the difference. Great coffee, lower cost, no animals harmed. http://www.trung-nguyen-online.com/about-legendee-coffee.php http://www.trung-nguyen-online.com/about-legendee-coffee.php