THE PROCESS OF MAKING KOPI LUWAK

All coffee begins as a fragrant white flower, blanketing the hillsides like perfumed snow.

The flowers develop into green cherries about the size of a glass marble, inside each cherry two coffee beans sit facing each other.

After a few months the cherries ripen to a vivid red and are ready to be harvested, or eaten.

Luwaks are generally nocturnal and steal into the coffee plantation at night to feast on coffee cherries. Fruit forms a significant portion of a luwak's diet so they are adept at selecting the ripest, juiciest cherries. This ability contributes to the final quality of kopi luwak; circumventing it by caging luwaks and feeding them coffee results in poorer quality kopi luwak.

It is also cruel, unethical, and displays a lack of compassion for the animals responsible for the livelihood of the people that do it.

The coffee cherries remain in the digestive tract of the luwaks for around twenty fours hours mixed with various other things the luwak has eaten. Raw kopi luwak often contains seeds and nuts as well as coffee beans.

During the digestive process the flesh of the cherries is removed leaving the seeds (the coffee beans) inside an inner skin, called the pergamino or parchment. The parchment is permeable allowing acids in the luwak's stomach to soak the beans causing the destruction of some of the proteins in the coffee and altering their final taste.

Once the kopi luwak has been collected Animalcoffee breaks down the pieces into individual beans, discarding all the unwanted components and reducing the volume of the kopi luwak by a considerable amount. The beans remain in the dry, papery parchment which needs to be removed.

The beans are spread out on dark tarpaulin in the sun for a few days to dry the parchment and make it easier to remove.

Once the skin/ parchment has dried sufficiently the beans are put into a wooden mortar and pounded with a pestle by hand. The beans themselves are harder than wood and remain unaffected by the treatment while the brittle parchment breaks apart and separates from the beans.

The resulting kopi luwak beans are hand sorted to remove any that appear damaged or unusual, a tedious and time consuming process.

After sorting the beans are given a final wash in fresh water, dried for a few days to prevent mould, and stored in hessian sacks.

A batch of raw kopi luwak may lose as much as 80% by weight by the time it is ready for roasting. A further 20% of that weight is lost during the roasting process, due to moisture loss, so 10kg of raw kopi luwak may produce as little as 1.5kg to 2.0kg of roasted kopi luwak beans.