Civet-Excreted Coffee: The Priciest, but are we Sure?

There's a seven-feet coffee plant with limbs laden with black, deep crimson, red, orange, and yellow green berries that's growing in front of our house here in California. While looking at it yesterday afternoon, I cannot help but to think of two things: the most expensive coffee in the world and my childhood coffee experience in Mindanao, the second biggest, of the 7,100, islands of the Philippines, and just few hundred miles north of some Indonesian islands.

Yes, the Indonesian Kopi Luwak has been considered as the world's priciest coffee. Due to it's exotic extra flavor and the high demand from Japanese, British and American coffee drinkers to its low supply, the market dictates a whooping $500 for a pound or $50 for a cup,once brewed.

Kopi Luwak, as we probably all know by now, are collected on the ground from the excreta of the wild palm civet cat. Its passing through the animal's digestive system is believed to give its extra flavor. However, like the US-based food and drink critic, Chris Rubin, I question this marketing blitz. Is it the very unique process of depoding or the perfect ripeness of the berries, that only the palm civet cats know, gives that added musty flavor?

With more than thirty coffee plants robustly standing tall in our backyard, while growing up in southern Philippines, my friends and I usually were having fun racing to trees with lots of deep crimson berries. Why? I tell you why. Deep crimson berries means that they are fully ripe; hence, their pulps are very sweet and easy and soft to depod. But not only that! They also signify that there are lots of coffee beans on the ground that bats, rats, and (who knows) four-legged or two-legged (?) civet cats excreted or dropped on the ground for our picking.

We usually picked those fallen beans first before climbing up those 50-foot, more or less, coffee trees. Most of our coffee plants were Coffea arabica, and very few Coffea robusta (the shorter plant with smaller berries). We preferred to take the risk of (or enjoy)climbing those tall trees, because the pulp of arabica is sweeter, the marble-sized berries are enjoyable to pop into our mouths, the Chinese coffee buyer in town buy it few centavos more, and most of our parents preferred the flavor of brewed arabica more than that of the "commercial", shorter and smaller robusta.

Oh, yes, these five- to ten-year old two-legged "civet cats" climbed up those trees with tin cans strapped around their waist first thing in the summer morning, happily perched on those berry-laden sturdy branches, often times moving from one limb to another, while depoding those deep crimson berries with their mouths. They often tell jokes and horsing around by shaking the limbs hoping that their friends will move away. Holding ones dear life and laughing with five to ten berries in ones mouth were not a good combination, because many times, these two-legged "civet cats" ended up swallowing the slimy coffee beans. (Oh, yes, they have constipation the next day... and some would either pushed hard to poop while up the coffee tree or come-down and dig a shallow hole underneath those trees.)

If we just have known before that these coffee beans that pass through someones digestive system have very high market value around the world, we could have not strapped those cumbersome tin cans around our waist anymore. We could have just swallowed both the sweet nectar of those deep crimson berries and all the coffee beans for our picking the next day. Oh, well, the information is out since December of last year. Some two-legged "civet cats" are surely going to be young secret "millionaires". Secret or secrete "millionaries"? Just an insinuation! Don't puke!

Seriously, those who know (and are very sure) that the priciest coffee beans are from a four-legged wild palm civet cat excreta, please stand up!


Note: The short story, "The Coffee and the Two-Legged "Civet Cats", is included in my book project, Bedtime-Pastime: Collections of Short Stories and Bukidnon Folktales.