Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/world/asia/18civetcoffee.html?pagewanted=2&ref=world&src=me

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

SAGADA, the Philippines — Goad Sibayan went prospecting recently in the remote Philippine highlands here known as the Cordillera. He clambered up and then down a narrow, rocky footpath that snaked around some hills, paying no heed to coffins that, in keeping with a local funeral tradition, hung very conspicuously from the surrounding sheer cliffs.
The New York Times

More than 30 families are involved in the civet coffee business in Liwa.

Reaching a valley where coffee trees were growing abundantly, he scanned the undergrowth where he knew the animals would relax after picking the most delicious coffee cherries with their claws and feasting on them with their fangs. His eyes settled on a light, brownish clump atop a rock. He held it in his right palm and, gently slipping it into a little black pouch, whispered:

“Gold!”

Not quite. But Mr. Sibayan’s prize was the equivalent in the world of rarefied coffees: dung containing the world’s most expensive coffee beans.

Costing hundreds of dollars a pound, these beans are found in the droppings of the civet, a nocturnal, furry, long-tailed catlike animal that prowls Southeast Asia’s coffee-growing lands for the tastiest, ripest coffee cherries. The civet eventually excretes the hard, indigestible innards of the fruit — essentially, incipient coffee beans — though only after they have been fermented in the animal’s stomach acids and enzymes to produce a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.

As connoisseurs in the United States, Europe and East Asia have discovered civet coffee in recent years, growing demand is fueling a gold rush in the Philippines and Indonesia, the countries with the largest civet populations. Harvesters are scouring forest floors in the Philippines, where civet coffee has emerged as a new business. In Indonesia, where the coffee has a long history, enterprising individuals are capturing civets and setting up minifarms, often in their backyards.

Neither the Indonesian government nor the Association of Indonesia Coffee Exporters breaks down civet coffee’s tiny share of Indonesia’s overall coffee production. The Association of Indonesian Coffee Luwak Farmers, created in 2009 to handle the rising demand for civet coffee, or kopi luwak, as it is called in Indonesian, said most civet producers were small-time businessmen who exported directly overseas.

Given the money at stake, fake and low-grade civet coffee beans are also flooding the market.

“Because of its increasing popularity, there is more civet coffee than ever, but I don’t trust the quality,” said Rudy Widjaja, 68, whose 131-year-old family-owned coffee store in Jakarta, Warung Tinggi, is considered Indonesia’s oldest.

Competition is touching off fierce debates. What is real civet coffee, anyway? Does the civet’s choice of beans make the coffee? Or is it the beans’ journey through the animal’s digestive tract? Can the aroma, fragrance and taste of beans from the droppings of a caged civet ever be as tasty as those from its wild cousin?

Vie Reyes, whose Manila-based company, Bote Central, entered the civet coffee business five years ago, said she bought only from harvesters of the wild kind. Ms. Reyes exports to distributors overseas — Japan and South Korea are her biggest markets — and also directly sells 2.2-pound bags for $500, or about $227 a pound.

Maintaining quality was a constant challenge because distinguishing the real stuff from the fake was never easy. One time, harvesters sold her regular beans glued to unidentified dung.

“I washed it,” she said. “But the glue wouldn’t come off.”

One of her suppliers, Mr. Sibayan, 37, buys beans from collectors throughout the Cordillera, a mountainous region in the north that can be reached only after a punishing 12-hour drive from Manila. On a recent day, he dropped by to see the Pat-ogs, who own a 1.7-acre lot just outside this town.

Until Mr. Sibayan began buying their civet coffee four years ago, the Pat-ogs had never given much thought to the droppings left behind by the civets that came to munch on the family’s coffee trees at night. They discarded the beans or mixed them with regular beans they sold to agents. Now, they were getting about $9 a pound for the civet beans, or about five times the price of regular coffee beans, which, furthermore, required labor-intensive harvesting.

Mr. Sibayan inspected their batch and said he would pay just under top-grade price. He had found some impurities — inferior beans that the civet had spat out; beans chewed on, not by civets, but bats — that were indiscernible to all but Mr. Sibayan’s expert eye or, rather, tongue.

Licking one bean, he explained that real civet coffee beans should have lost their natural sweetness and acquired a rough texture. “This is pure, good quality,” he said, adding, “Once, some farmers tried to fool me by slightly roasting regular beans to remove the sweetness.”

Alberto Pat-og, 60, a retired school principal, said he did not understand why foreigners were willing to pay so much for a cup of the stuff.

“We are a bit surprised,” he said. “A bit perplexed.”

His son, Lambert, 20, added, with a big grin, “We are ignorant.”

The Pat-ogs wished they could expand their business but said there were simply not enough civets around. Compounding the problem, farmers around these parts tended to trap civets, which also have a taste for chicken. Local residents still prized civets less for their coffee-picking ability than their meat, which was typically dried before being prepared adobo-style.

“It’s very difficult to convince my neighbors not to kill civets because they’re considered such a delicacy here,” the father said.

In Indonesia, too, a shrinking civet population is creating obstacles for those hoping to ride the civet coffee boom. Civet coffee has long been centered in the western island of Sumatra, where a growing human population, economic development and deforestation have eroded their habitats.

Mr. Widjaja, the Jakarta store owner, said that the Dutch, who ruled Indonesia for more than three centuries, and Japanese soldiers, who occupied the country during World War II, were the most die-hard drinkers of civet coffee. But the coffee all but disappeared after the late 1950s, he said, and resurfaced on the market only after its reputation began spreading overseas. After he began fielding inquiries in 2007 from interested buyers in the United States, Japan and Taiwan, he secured a regular supply of wild civet coffee and began selling it only last year — at $150 a pound.

In Liwa, a small town in southwestern Sumatra, more than 30 families were involved in civet coffee.

Mega Kurniawan, 28, entered the business two years ago by setting up shop in the backyard of his family home. He had already expanded to three other locations and was now in civets full time. With a total of 102 civets, he gathered about 550 pounds of beans a month.

During the day, Mr. Kurniawan’s civets slept inside their small wooden cages before growing active at dusk. At night, the animals ate from fresh plates of coffee cherries, replenished every two hours, or paced back and forth at a brisk, caffeinated clip.

Though caged, the civets ate only about half of the beans placed before them, choosing only the best specimens, Mr. Kurniawan insisted. He dismissed connoisseurs’ criticism that stress felt by the caged animals invariably affected the taste of the beans.

“It’s the same,” he said, acknowledging, however, that some buyers preferred wild civet coffee. “Maybe it’s the prestige.”

A few blocks away, Ujang Suryana, 62, had his own firm opinions about what constituted real civet coffee. A reflexologist, Mr. Suryana began moonlighting in civets three months ago after catching a local television report on the brew’s popularity abroad. He pooled $1,000 to buy three civets and cages.

He had already found a way to increase the civets’ output exponentially by mechanically stripping the coffee beans from the cherries and mixing them in a banana mash. The civets gobbled it all up. This way, no beans were wasted. What is more, he had raised the dung production from 2.2 pounds a week to a whopping 6.6 pounds a day.

But wasn’t Mr. Suryana denying the civet its renowned ability to sniff out the best beans?

He scrunched up his face as if to wave away the suggestion. “The most important thing is that the beans go through its stomach and are fermented,” he said. “It all tastes the same, anyway.”

From here we can say that the coffee shouldn’t be too bitter or sour. A light hint of charcoal would be acceptable in some blends, whereas an aroma with a smoky flavor would be inexcusable.

No matter what type of blend is used, however, there should not be any one element dominating the others. The taste of an excellent espresso should be well balanced and memorable. This harmony and refinement is the gamut of taste that will spread in your mouth with many nuances, will set off a light bulb in your head and give you an incredible aftertaste.

In order for the taste to be roundish and “playing”, it’s not enough to just take good coffee and correctly roast it. It’s necessary to draw up coffee blends with a different parity of flavoring parameters.

Italians jealously protect recipes of the best blends, and the matter is not only one of selection and the variety of brands. There are many other important points - from the way of gathering the coffee beans to the method of storing and processing the beans.

The way coffee is grounded and on what equipment it’s prepared is very important. If the grinding is too coarse, extraction will be weak and all the aromatic and other flavorful and useful substances will remain in raw materials and thrown out, and the taste of the drink will be rather mediocre.                                                                                                                                        If the grinding is too fine, and the espresso machine does not provide the necessary pressure, water hardly passes through the pressed coffee.

It also might be dangerous for the barista, because in the attempt to clean up the portafilter and to see what happened, coffee can splatter around the room, splashing the unfortunate barista with hot brown water.

Hence, in order to say that you personally tried real Italian espresso, you should check that the bar or restaurant where you drink coffee works under the mark of the Certificate of Italian Espresso. To such institutions there are strict requirements:

* Use of certified mixes of coffee

* Use of certified equipment

* Use of certified personnel

What does the document of the Certificate of Italian Espresso represent? These are strict requirements for coffee, developed by the Italian Espresso National Institute and approved by a certified committee in accordance with the standards of ISO 45011, namely Certificate CSQA No. 214 from September 24th,1999.

The certificate states that Italian espresso is made of a blend of roasted beans of varied origin prepared in a special device so that the drinks made had a well distinguished organic taste corresponding to the requirements of the scientific censor analysis.

There should be an intense taste with notes of flowers, fruits, and roasted bread and chocolate - this scale can very depending on the name of a coffee blend, but the taste should invariably be oily, strong, and velvety. All the flavors should give a good aftertaste, and the aroma should remain for a few minutes.

Another important point is that there shouldn’t be any artificial flavors! The taste of true espresso doesn’t require masking. To distinguish the additives in a coffee is possible, by recognizing a strongly pronounced non-coffee aroma (usually it’s imitation caramel, Irish Cream, or almonds), and a strong chemical aftertaste.

If the institution serves you coffee in pods, make sure that the pod is pressed in a special filtering paper instead of a plastic case. Besides the distinct smack of plastic, such a product is also bad for your health. There’s a reason such coffee pods are officially forbidden in all of Europe.

Specialists say that, much like with wines, you have to try as many different brands as possible to find your favorite coffee. Even brand name coffees can differ in quality, since the beans are grown in different plantations in each country. The taste and aroma of the beans depend on the climate as well as the condition of the soil. The only thing left is to look and choose.

People stumbled across the way to make drinks from coffee beans through a long process of trial and error. Now many people in the world wouldn’t be able to imagine their lives without coffee. Coffee was actually discovered by Europeans only in the Seventeenth Century, thanks to Venetian merchants.

How did Europeans keep awake in the morning before that?

Preparing coffee or espresso from  “golden beans”  a nickname for expensive blends won’t , ensure a high quality of coffee.
It’s easy to believe that golden beans make good coffee when you generally don’t know that much about coffee and when you’re hit over to forehead with the message since you’ve been born that expensive=quality. I know you know that isn’t always the case when it comes to things that you buy.   Money doesn’t make up for expertise and that is certainly the case when we’re talking about coffee.

The quality of coffee depends on two major factors. The first factor to consider is no surprise; the coffee beans used. It’s important to know what coffee beans that are used in fresh blends. In fact, there are many kinds of blends. Each one of them has a unique taste and is prepared differently. There are people, mostly in Italy, who make a living preparing different kinds of coffees. They’re called baristas. Baristas employ a considerable amount of knowledge and skill to their craft. You don’t have to know everything a barista knows to make constantly good coffee. You will try different beans and blends. You’ll most likely settle on a specific kind of coffee bean or a blend that you like more than others. Learn how that blend is prepared and you will make that coffee as good as a barista, I promise.
The second factor to consider is not so obvious; The type and condition of your espresso or coffee maker.
People tend to miss this. Just like any tool, it needs to be maintained. It’s key that espresso and coffee makers are taken care of, if you want consistency to the taste of your coffee. If you start to notice that after a while that the taste of your coffee has changed, don’t blame the machine. Don’t even blame your coffee bean supplier.
Ask yourself if you’ve been cleaning the parts of your machine correctly. Chances are you, probably haven’t been cleaning your coffee or espresso machine’s parts so you’re probably tasting the residue of old coffee beans in addition to what you intended. Ick. That strange taste can be avoided by just cleaning the machine. It’s really that simple.

And remember, when it comes to blends, espresso “lives” only three minutes.
You’ll see what I mean.