Kopi Luwak: What Civet Coffee Really Is, and Why So Many Experts Say Skip It

Kopi luwak is coffee made from cherries that have been eaten by Asian palm civets, passed through their digestive tract and collected from their droppings. The beans are then washed, dried and roasted like any other coffee. It is famous as one of the most expensive coffees in the world — and increasingly infamous, because most of it now comes from wild animals kept in cages, a lot of what is sold is fake, and blind tasting suggests it is not better coffee anyway.

How kopi luwak is made

The Asian palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, is a small, cat-like mammal that lives in trees across South and South-East Asia and eats fruit, including ripe coffee cherries. The fruit is digested; the hard seeds inside — the coffee beans — pass through.

The practice is usually traced to the Dutch coffee plantations of colonial Indonesia, where, around two centuries ago, workers collected beans from civet droppings on the estates. Kopi luwak is still produced mainly on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali and Sulawesi, and in East Timor, and it is gathered in the Philippines, where it goes by names such as kapé alamíd. Vietnam has its own version.

Traditionally, the droppings were picked up in plantations and forests where wild civets roamed. That is a slow, unpredictable way to produce coffee, and as demand grew, producers found a faster one: catching civets and caging them.

What the civet's gut does to the bean

The digestion is real, and it does change the bean. The clearest evidence comes from Massimo Marcone, a food scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who published his analysis in Food Research International in 2004.

• Surface pitting. Under 10,000× magnification, kopi luwak beans showed pitting on their surface that ordinary beans from the same region of Sumatra did not — almost certainly the work of digestive enzymes.
• Protein breakdown. Inside the bean, proteins had been broken down into smaller pieces. During roasting, those broken proteins take part in the browning reactions that create much of coffee's aroma, so the flavour should differ.
• Less protein overall. The beans contained less protein than the controls, apparently leached out during digestion. Marcone suggested this might explain the smoothness drinkers describe.

He also pointed out that the civet's gut, which contains lactic acid bacteria, works rather like the fermentation stage of washed processing on a coffee farm. The processing guide explains how fermentation shapes flavour. The other claimed advantage is selection: a civet is said to pick the ripest cherries, as a careful human picker would.

Does it taste better?

Different, yes. Better is much harder to support.

For Marcone's research, a professional coffee taster ran a blind test and rated kopi luwak as distinctly different from a control coffee — with less acidity and less body. An electronic nose confirmed the difference. That fits the chemistry: less of the bright acidity and fullness that cuppers usually prize, and a smoother, flatter cup.

Whether you like that is a matter of taste. But a coffee with less acidity and less body is not what the specialty coffee world means by a better coffee, and many in the industry regard kopi luwak as a novelty bought for its story. Marcone himself said people were "after the rarity of the coffee" rather than its flavour.

From 230 kilograms to 50 tonnes

The story that sells kopi luwak is scarcity. The arithmetic says that story stopped being true long ago.

In 2004, New Scientist reported that only about 230 kg of kopi luwak was produced each year. In 2013, Tony Wild — the coffee buyer who first brought kopi luwak to the West — wrote that while marketers still claimed about 500 kg a year, he estimated global production at at least 50 tonnes, with farmers in India, Vietnam, China and the Philippines joining in.

Put those side by side: 50,000 kg ÷ 230 kg ≈ 217 times as much in under a decade. Wild civets did not multiply two-hundredfold. The growth came from caged production — and, in part, from coffee that never went near a civet.

The welfare problem

Caged civets live very differently from wild ones. In the wild, palm civets are night-active tree-dwellers that eat fruit, insects and small animals. On the farms that supply much of the kopi luwak trade, they are kept in isolation in small cages and fed large amounts of coffee cherries.

The evidence is consistent across researchers and journalists:

• A 2016 study in the journal Animal Welfare assessed 48 wild-caught palm civets at 16 tourist-oriented coffee plantations in Bali, scoring their mobility, hygiene, shelter, noise, food, water and social contact. It found inadequate conditions that were not associated with the traditional collection of droppings from wild civets.
• A 2023 study of 29 civet-coffee tourist plantations in Bali found 99 caged civets, and in the wildlife markets that supply them, an annual trade of 400–800 animals. No civet had all five of the basic animal-welfare "freedoms" met, and conditions fell short of Indonesian law.
• A 2013 BBC investigation filmed civets in battery-cage conditions in Sumatra, including one with a severely injured paw, and found farmers there supplying exporters whose coffee reached Europe and Asia. A wildlife expert who viewed the footage described the animals as "absolutely depressed and miserable".

Fakes, and why "wild" labels cannot be trusted

Even setting welfare aside, buying kopi luwak is a gamble. Marcone, who tested samples for buyers, said that about half of the kopi luwak he tested was fake. The BBC's investigators met an Indonesian exporter whose vice president admitted that the contents of its "Wild Luwak" product could not be controlled: it asked farmers whether the beans were wild, and did not check.

Science can now catch some fakes. A 2013 metabolomics study identified chemical markers — citric acid, malic acid and the ratio of inositol to pyroglutamic acid — that distinguished genuine kopi luwak from regular coffee, from fakes, and even from blends containing 50% kopi luwak. But no test can tell a shopper whether the civet that ate the cherries was wild or caged. As one experienced coffee trader told Tony Wild, the only way to guarantee wild kopi luwak would be to follow a civet around all night yourself.

The man who started it wants it stopped

Tony Wild first read about kopi luwak in a 1981 issue of National Geographic. In 1991, as coffee director of the British company Taylors of Harrogate, he imported a single kilogram — the first, he says, to reach the West — mainly as a curiosity for local news. The story went global, and so did the coffee, all the way to Oprah and a Hollywood film.

In 2013 he launched a campaign to end the trade he had helped create, calling modern kopi luwak "overpriced, industrialised, cruel — and frequently inauthentic".

If you want something extraordinary instead

The appeal of kopi luwak is a coffee that tastes unlike any other and comes with a story. Specialty coffee offers plenty of those without the problems. A carefully made natural or experimental fermented coffee can taste startlingly of fruit or wine; a variety such as Gesha sells for record prices on flavour alone; and a top Ethiopian natural can be one of the most aromatic cups you will ever drink. All of them can be traced to a farm, and none involves an animal in a cage.