Taiwanese team develops artifical Kopi Luwak

Could Kopi Luwak be on its way out?

After seven years of experiments and a few field trips to Indonesia, a Taiwanese research team from the National Pingtung University of Technology and Science (NPUTS) believe that they have created their very own, laboratory made Kopi Luwak.

But don’t worry, no civets were caged or trapped to make this product!

Now, as many of you will already know, Kopi Luwak is an expensive form of coffee that is collected from the droppings of wild civets. Normally, this is a normal occurrence – the nocturnal mammals ingest the coffee beans which are then passed through their digestive system.

Unfortunately however, there is a predictable dark side to this type of coffee. The authenticity of some of the beans can be muddled to say the least. The true, wild sourced beans are the most prized, but that doesn’t stop a number of truly reprehensible people capturing and keeping civets locked up in unnatural conditions, solely for the purpose of producing this sought after coffee.

Led by professor Xie Baoquan and Hsiesh Pau-chaun, a vice-dean at the University, a team was assembled in a bid to replicate the flavours of Kopi Luwak and, hopefully, overhaul the current murky and ambiguous supply chain.

They initially started out by travelling to Indonesia where Hsieh and his research fellows safely collected a total 136 strains of bacteria from the intestines of wild civets.

Using gas chromatography, they subsequently managed to isolate sixteen strains of bacteria which had a transformative effect upon a batch of Sumatran grown Mandheling coffee.

Now, some seven years and countless hours later, they have managed to perfect a process that allows them to mimic the changes brought about by a civet’s digestive cycle.

According to Hsieh, this “created civet coffee” exhibits a strong floral and fruity aroma and ‘tastes of caramel, cinnamon and chocolate’, adding that there’s a noticeable ‘fruit-like’ acidity in the aftertaste.

It takes up to twenty-four hours to create and is produced solely in NPUTS’s laboratories.

At the moment it can only be bought in Taiwan where it costs $285 per 1kg, firmly placing it in the ‘luxury beverage’ market, though they do hope that if it can be mass produced the price will substantially drop somewhat.