BioCoder #9

Chapter 1. Afineur

Glen Martin

In the realm of coffee, kopi luwak is the ne plus ultra, the best of the very best, a coffee that transcends superlatives. At least, that’s what people who have tasted it claim. Admittedly, that’s a rather small and select cohort, due to the fact that kopi luwak sells for up to $600 a pound; a single demitasse of the revered brew can cost $90. Why so much lucre for a simple cup of joe? Three words: Indonesian civet cats.

To make kopi luwak, you need these small and rather adorable omnivores as much as you need coffee beans. In their native Indonesia, civet cats roam freely through the nation’s vast coffee plantations, gobbling the ripening “cherries” directly from the trees. They digest the flesh of the cherries readily enough, but the seeds—the coffee beans—pass through intact. And yet, they are not the same beans that hung on the tree prior to ingestion. Not surprisingly, considering the dynamic environment of a typical civet gut, their flavor and aroma profiles have been transformed. 

Somewhere, at a time lost in the misty annals of coffee culture, an Indonesian plantation worker looked down at a pile of civet excrement brimming with undigested coffee beans and wondered: Could you brew that? That moment evokes Jonathan Swift’s rumination on certain shellfish, viz., “…It was a bold man that first ate an oyster.” In any event, a gelatinous and gelid raw oyster ultimately slid down the gullet of an adventurous human, who found it good. And at a particular ...