Certus Stone

Podcaster by day; sleeping by night.

A Review Of Civet Coffee

[ - review - Certus]

Recently, a friend of mine was gracious enough to share a few cups of Kopi Luwak that they received as a gift.

I had to be told what it was and why it was special: basically a rat eats the fruit and the digestion process ferments the cherry. The remains of the fruit are collected and cleaned after they have been fully digested and are sold for incredibly high amounts of money. Our beans were from Bali.

I can appreciate coffee to a point. I like to say that I can tell the difference between “good” coffee and “bad” coffee 95% of the time, and the difference between “good” coffee and “great” coffee about 20% of the time. My friend is much more adept than me, so they had to explain a lot of the brewing process to me.

We started by just smelling the beans. They were fragrant, but not dark. My friend contrasted them with a dark Sumatra which made me loose my sense of smell, briefly. The Kopi Luwak beans smelled a bit like hazelnut and chocolate.

We brewed the drink with a Cezve (Turkish coffee pot which immerses the grounds in the boiling water) to make a very strong brew to make the flavors obvious. After pouring it, the coffee had the consistency of whole milk (a very “full body” for those who know what that means). The hazelnut and chocolate did not present themselves to my untrained pallet, but it did have a very nice flavor that was bitter and not acidic at all. It was super smooth which I really like in a coffee. My coffee-snob friend told me that while the coffee was “pretty good” it was just that.

This was a novel experience that I do not feel the need to repeat. Perhaps if I could achieve the same results from coffee that I could pay a reasonable price for, brew using a pour-over, and not worry about the moral implications of, I would make it my morning coffee, but that’s not what Kopi Luwak is. It really is just a gimmick that produces coffee that is “pretty good.”

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