Luwak Coffee

As I walk into the dimly lit room, I’m met by the stench of caged animals and the rattle of metal wire. Another group of curious young tourists stand in the tight corridor between sets of restless civets: cat-like creatures native to Indonesia’s forests.

The visitors look eager-eyed and curious. They listen to a small Indonesian man, who is instructing them on the basics of distilling coffee through an animal’s digestive system.

Surrounding us, poor wretched animals feebly eat bean after bean of their strict coffee diet. This will be the course of their two to three year life, as their excrement is picked and processed in the final stages of Luwak coffee production.

Thirty minutes earlier, sat on a balcony, I surveyed a wide and gorgeous Javanese landscape. Lush, green paddy fields spread out in front of me, flanked by hills of clear cut geometric tea plantations.

A curious young tourist, I took sips from my first Luwak coffee. There was nothing extraordinary about this coffee. And it certainly didn’t deserve its excessive price tag.

However, I was here. In Indonesia, drinking Luwak coffee. It should be documented, right?

Taking an iPhone in one hand and the clean white coffee cup in the other, I took a selfie with the beautiful background flaring in the sunlight behind me.

‘Drinking coffee that’s come out of a cat’s arse. Lol!’, I attached to the photo, whatsapping it to a group of mates.

Setting the iPhone down, I gazed into the Indonesian landscape. My mind enters an ignorant dream-like trance, in which civets play in the forest; happy cat-like creatures hopping between trees and coffee plants, nibbling, picking, eating and digesting polished beans, followed by bent and crouching rural Javanese that examine the undergrowth for the prized stool.

I have never since ordered a Luwak coffee.