How Do You Know if Your Coffee Uses Civit Cats?
From gross to gourmet. That pretty much sums up civet poop coffee.
The beans are literally harvested from the feces of the tree-dwelling civet cat in Indonesia. The idea is that a trip through the animate being'south digestive tract partially ferments the beans and imparts a much-sought-later on flavour to the java.
The exotic processing makes the coffee, called Kopi Luwak, exceptionally rare — and expensive: Think $600 per pound. And thus, experts suspect that much of what's sold as civet coffee on the marketplace is actually either fake or made from low-grade beans.
At present biotechnologists in Nihon accept developed the first chemical test to differentiate predigested coffee plucked from civet poop from regular beans picked from trees. In the process, the team also uncovered some clues about why Kopi Luwak is 1 of the most prized coffees in the world.
There'due south been a big contend here in the U.S. most whether the strange brew is worth the hefty price tag, not to mention the fell weather in which civets are farmed to produce it.
Much ado about cypher? Left: civet poop coffee beans. Right: a loving cup of java brewed from the stuff. Claire O'Neill/NPR hide caption
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Claire O'Neill/NPR
Some professional coffee buyers call Kopi Luwak a gimmick and think its quality doesn't stand upwardly to the hype. "One of the strongest arguments confronting this coffee — and ane that seems to meet a general consensus inside the industry — is that it only tastes bad," Lily Kubota of the Specialty Coffee Association of America wrote on the society'due south website.
Just biotechnologist Sastia Prama Putri of Osaki Academy in Nihon couldn't disagree more than. "Kopi Luwak is exquisite," she tells The Salt. "I ordinarily can't potable black coffee. I demand milk and carbohydrate. But I can beverage Kopi Luwak blackness."
Putri argues that counterfeit coffees are giving the civet poop coffee a bad name. And so she and her colleagues in the lab of Eiichiro Fukusaki went searching for a chemic fingerprint that could uniquely identify the gut-processed beans. "We want to be sure people around the world can try the real Kopi Luwak," she says.
The squad ground upward 21 different coffees from Indonesia, including seven Kopi Luwak varieties, and and so measured the flavor compounds within the beans.
Fans of civet coffee, similar Putri, say it'due south smoother and less bitter than a regular loving cup of joe. Merely her squad's testing establish that predigestion of the beans in the civet'south gut didn't significantly alter the compounds that contribute to coffee's bitterness, like quinic acid, caffeine and caffeic acid.
What the predigestion did change was the citric acid levels nowadays in the basis-up beans. The gastric juices and enzymes in the civet's gut boosted citrus acrid levels twofold, Putri says.
A civet cat eats scarlet coffee cherries at a farm in Bondowoso, Republic of indonesia. Civets are really more than closely related to meerkats and mongooses than to cats. Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images hide caption
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Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images
A civet cat eats red coffee cherries at a farm in Bondowoso, Republic of indonesia. Civets are actually more closely related to meerkats and mongooses than to cats.
Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images
By measuring the citric acid concentration, together with that of malic acid and the ratio of two other compounds (pyroglutamic acid and inositol for all your flavor buffs), the team could successfully split up the existent McCoy coffee from the fakes. It reported its findings in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
And so could a boost in citrus acid be the underground behind Kopi Luwak's appeal? Perhaps, says coffee heir-apparent Marking Overly, who runs Kaladi Java Roasters in Denver and blogs at The Coffee Heretic.
"Citric acid is highly prized in coffee," Overly says. "It has a prissy lemony quality. It brightens a cup of coffee and makes information technology more lively — much like with a good drinking glass of orange juice."
Ironically, he says, citric acrid is an indicator that the beans are fresh and clean. "Having more of it in the civet coffee seems counter to what I idea sitting around in the cat'south digestive tract would practice," he says.
Just all the same, the actress acid doesn't modify Overly'southward mind about the civet poop coffee: He refuses to bear upon the stuff. "I won't taste it. I won't put it in my roaster," he says doggedly. "Information technology goes confronting my philosophy about having clean coffee" — past which he ways the unadulterated flavor of pure coffee beans.
Although he's never tried civet poop coffee, Overly says he was turned off by the thought of it — or actually, the stench of information technology — twenty years ago. "Back in 1993, I helped an Indonesian farmer transport some of the civet coffee, and I remember the reek that came off the bags of beans," he says. "Fifty-fifty after the beans were cleaned, they had a wretched odor. I remember thinking, 'People drink this? Are you lot kidding me?' "
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/09/02/218232266/is-your-pricey-cup-of-cat-poop-coffee-fake-there-s-a-test-for-that
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