Coffee Features

The Moral Complexities of Civet Coffee

Fionn Pooler

Mar 15, 2024 — 11 min read

It’s all Jack Nicholson’s fault. In 2007 he starred with Morgan Freeman in ‘The Bucket List’, a surprise box office hit about two men with terminal cancer who decide to embark on a globetrotting adventure before they kick the bucket. (Fun fact: This movie coined the now-common “bucket list” phrase.)

Nicholson plays a billionaire CEO in the film, and a recurring plot point is his character’s love for kopi luwak— “the rarest beverage in the world”, as he describes it. Only at the end does he learn why it’s so rare (and expensive): “Kopi luwak” is the Indonesian name for coffee that has been eaten, partially digested, and excreted by the Asian palm civet. It’s literally poop coffee.

The movie’s runaway success helped catapult kopi luwak into the mainstream. Following its release, the Specialty Coffee Association fielded numerous enquiries from journalists, and kopi luwak briefly became a media sensation.

Today, kopi luwak is still sought after by a particular type of wealthy coffee drinker: George Howell, one of the trailblazers of specialty coffee in the United States, has called it “coffee from assholes for assholes”. In the media, civet coffee is generally depicted as either a joke or something to be railed against. High demand, and high price points, have driven some farmers to cage civets to produce kopi luwak in larger quantities, and organisations like PETA and the BBC have uncovered resultant animal welfare scandals.

Kopi luwak is an easy target for our ire. Civets are cute, and caging and force-feeding cute animals is generally frowned upon. Couple this with the obnoxious international consumer base, and condemning the coffee becomes a simple cause that anyone can get behind.

However, the reality is more nuanced than expected—and digging into the wider context of civet coffee unearths a compelling and morally complicated story.

‘An Indigenous Workers’ Secret’

The Asian palm civet is a small, nocturnal mammal that looks like the hybrid of a cat and a raccoon, and which is native to the forests of South and Southeast Asia. While omnivorous, it enjoys snacking on ripe coffee cherries as a treat. It swallows them and goes about its night, digesting and eventually passing the beans. Its droppings, once thoroughly washed and dried, are roasted to become kopi luwak.

The provenance of kopi luwak is tangled up with the coffee industry’s original sin of colonialism. The Dutch controlled Indonesia for more than 300 years, and coffee was a hugely profitable export, made possible by the exploitation and forced labour of local people. There are several stories about kopi luwak’s genesis; the most commonly cited is that, because workers on coffee plantations were forbidden from consuming what they picked, they cleaned and roasted the civet’s droppings instead.

Civet coffee “began as an Indigenous workers’ secret”, says Will Frith, founder of Building Coffee in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. “Once farm owners learned about it, they quickly co-opted that to add to their product list, leading to the storytelling and mystique that surrounds this coffee that shouldn’t really be a widely available thing”.

Another theory of its origins concerns the Dutch colonial government’s Cultuurstelsel, or Cultivation System, wherein Indonesians were forced to dedicate a portion of their agricultural land to growing export crops like sugar and coffee. Because quotas were so strict, workers would search for any and all coffee to add to their haul—including from civet poop.

This intermingling of kopi luwak with Indonesia’s colonial past bestows it with a particularly charged cultural identity. “For me, kopi luwak is not just a product; it has now become a cultural heritage, something that we cherish”, says Adi W. Taroepratjeka, who runs the coffee academy 5758 Coffee Lab in Bandung, Indonesia. “We cherish it not as a product, but as a story that we pass on from one generation to another”.

‘A Nouveau Riche Market Purchase’

From the 19th century onwards, the trade in kopi luwak was mostly contained to Indonesia. When it spread, it was to nearby countries where civets are also numerous, like Vietnam (where it is known as cà phê chồn) and the Philippines (kapé alamíd in Tagalog). It wasn’t until the ’90s that Tony Wild, at the time the coffee director for Taylors of Harrogate, first introduced kopi luwak to the West. A 2003 segment on Oprah increased its visibility before ‘The Bucket List’ really took it mainstream. Demand grew exponentially.

But why is there such demand for kopi luwak? How did poop coffee become so prized in the first place?

The pitch is that the enzymes within the civet’s digestive system ferment the coffee beans as they pass through its body, supposedly imparting specific and delicious flavours to the coffee. Promoters speak of softer, more chocolatey notes, lower bitterness, and other desirable traits. However, coffee professionals tend to have a different take.

“It’s not super remarkable”, Frith tells me. “The legit stuff from wild civets seems to be mellow and balanced in flavour, but not remarkable enough to justify the price. Most of what’s sold on the market is either artificial or it’s produced using battery cages and very unhappy animals”.

“Despite my deep dislike for the whole concept, I have tried kopi luwak numerous times”, says Howell. “I’ve tasted everything from where the taste is very similar to what I would imagine it to be, to—when I’m in a bad mood—something utterly plain and boring. Kind of a completely lacklustre coffee”.

The mostly negative reactions from coffee experts haven’t prevented an entire mythos of quality and exclusivity from developing around kopi luwak in the foreign markets where it makes the most money. When Jack Nicholson’s character called it “the rarest beverage in the world” and boasted of its high price and excellent taste in ‘The Bucket List’, he was reflecting the general response of its target audience.

“I think it’s a sort of nouveau riche market purchase”, Frith explains. “It’s mostly folks who want to make an ‘impressive’ purchase without knowing much about coffee. Honestly, I think it’s a conversation piece, an impressive-seeming thing that people buy to show off”.

The sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption" in his 1899 work ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’ to describe the practice of purchasing luxury goods or services in order to display one’s wealth. If you have money, the theory goes, simply buying coffee isn’t enough; it has to be the most expensive, the rarest, the fanciest coffee possible. And while you could go and buy a bag of Cup of Excellence-winning Panama gesha, that might not impress your rich friends in the same way as spending thousands on a bag of poop coffee.

According to Dr. Kelcie Slaton, Assistant Professor of Merchandising and Digital Retailing at the University of North Texas who has written multiple papers on the subject of luxury consumerism, there are several elements at play regarding the attraction to civet coffee. “Motivations lie in the exclusivity and aspirational elements of the products, where few can obtain and many others cannot”, she notes. “In addition, personal needs are addressed by the experience of consumption of the product: it is novel and unique which plays on the luxury consumer’s need for uniqueness”.

This drive for the novel and unique in coffee has also led to other animals’ poop being co-opted. In Thailand, Black Ivory Coffee is a brand that sells elephant dung coffee to high-end hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants. Meanwhile, enterprising farmers in Brazil changed their minds about a bird previously considered a “plague” when they discovered it had a taste for coffee cherries—the result now sells for thousands at Harrods, the high-end department store in London.

Making (and Faking) ‘The World’s Most Expensive Coffee’

Today, kopi luwak is often erroneously called “the world’s most expensive coffee”, with costs sometimes soaring to thousands of dollars per kilogram (although it’s usually closer to hundreds of dollars). This eye-watering price, and the growth in demand, has resulted in massive quantities of fake, mislabelled kopi luwak flooding the market. It has also led to awful practices designed to extract as much coffee production from civets as possible.

These small animals don’t naturally produce enough coffee to meet heightened global demand for kopi luwak, and collecting the droppings from the forest floor is labour-intensive. Instead, it’s much easier to capture and cage the civets, and force-feed them coffee cherries, in order to increase production.

This rise in civet coffee farming has come with a spate of animal welfare problems, which have been documented extensively by the BBC, the Guardian, and groups like PETA and World Animal Protection.

These reports have formed the basis of the backlash against civet coffee, alongside the general sense that the target market is rich douchebags trying to impress their friends. While other actors—including scientists and biotech startups—have sought a way around the animal cruelty by developing artificial ways to mimic the effects of the civet’s digestive process, such methods are unlikely to appeal to the wealthy consumers for whom kopi luwak’s production is the primary source of its interest and value.

The abuses that occur among farmed civets are horrible to read about, and full of grotesque detail—no animals should suffer like that. But the more that I’ve researched this topic, the less sure I’ve felt about the tenor of Western civet coffee coverage. Much of it feels paternalistic and self-righteous, not to mention disingenuous. Caging and exploiting animals—that’s not something we do here in the Global North. Right?

‘A Utilitarian Element to the Relationship’

Maybe a better way to think about civet coffee is by comparing the industry to other farming communities. “I think there’s a lot of similarity with how agricultural families think of animals in the U.S. and in rural Indonesia”, says Dr. Colin Cahill, an anthropologist and coffee professional who wrote their PhD thesis in 2017 on the interaction between civets and humans in Indonesia. “There’s a kind of utilitarian element to the relationship that never fully disappears”.

Dr. Cahill spent 15 months doing fieldwork in the mountains of Indonesia, working with coffee producers and exploring their relationship to the civets around them. While there are some large civet-farming operations, the bulk of production takes place on smallholder farms.

“I was in the field, I was living with farmers when PETA’s campaign against the industry took off and when the Guardian put up a series of articles about it,” Dr. Cahill tells me. “And they were all just like, ‘Why? Why is everyone coming for us? Like what are we doing?’ There was just this sense of confusion and hopelessness.”

Smallholder producers are some of the most vulnerable actors in the coffee industry, and many still struggle to feed their families through coffee farming alone. Thirty-five percent of Indonesia’s 1.34 million coffee farmers live in poverty, and many struggle with low productivity and lack of institutional support (not to mention climate change).

Dr. Cahill explains that in many rural highland regions, farmers are reliant on coffee buyers who might come through their village once a year, and they don’t have much choice but to sell at whatever price they are offered. And that’s if the main road hasn’t been washed out by heavy rain. “There’s just so much risk in being a coffee farmer in rural Indonesia”, they explain. In such situations, using civets—widely considered a pest and often treated like vermin—as an extra source of income might be attractive.

“For farmers, these luwak are pests”, Adi tells me. “These are wild animals that will come to their field and basically rob them of their cherries. So for some of these farmers, caging the luwak is another way to get more income out of a pest that they don’t like so much”.

And the price is hugely variable. While some kopi luwak goes for hundreds of dollars a cup, much of it sells for far less. (There is high demand for civet coffee in countries like the United States, Japan, China, and Taiwan, but it’s considered a fairly run-of-the-mill purchase in the countries where it is produced, where it is sold in grocery stores and tourist traps, and consumed primarily by locals.) Dr. Cahill’s thesis notes that, in some areas of Indonesia between 2013-15, a cup could cost as little as 75 cents, and they tell me that farmers often struggle to sell their crops: “If you visit a lot of these farms, they’re almost giving it away”.

‘A Desperation for Opportunity’

The coffee industry is endlessly complicated and morally questionable, from its colonial past to its modern greenwashing and widespread labour concerns. Huge companies hoard profits while sending pennies on the dollar back to producing countries; splashy projects take the place of real systemic change; forests disappear to slake an ever-growing thirst for coffee.

From the outside, the issue of civet coffee seems pretty straightforward: Animal cruelty plus rich customers plus mediocre taste equals an easy thing to protest. Everyone loves cute animals; everyone hates rich douchebags. But if you’re a smallholder farmer in the mountains of Sumatra struggling to make a living and feed your family, and you hear about a neighbour who managed to sell coffee from civets—a pest on coffee farms—why wouldn’t you try it?

“I think in an industry where there’s a lot of people who want to feel more ethical, it’s really convenient to have what seems like black-and-white examples where no one’s there to speak up for the people involved”, Dr. Cahill tells me. “I don’t know if it’s oversimplifying, but it kind of shifts the animal from being this thing that appears in your trees and is annoying, and if you can you’re gonna shoot, to something that all of a sudden you’re touching sometimes and you’re trying to keep alive.

“I’m trying to avoid there being a kind of flat moral stance on any of these things, because it just always ends up doing an injustice to the people involved, but I think by and large it’s just fueled by a desperation for opportunity”.

What began as a byproduct of a colonial system has expanded to become an industry worth an estimated $7 billion, albeit one where upwards of 80% of the product could be fake. Caged civets suffer terribly, and most in the wider coffee industry, including the person who introduced it to the West, would now rather the practice disappeared for good.

I don’t claim to have an easy answer to this dilemma. I’m a vegan, and I care deeply about the lives and wellbeing of animals. I also care about coffee farmers, and I want them to succeed and thrive. The world we have created and inhabit is one where animals are exploited in their billions every day; it is in the Global North where many of these extractive and abusive factory-farming practices originated and persist.

Ultimately, if we are committed to saving civets and moving away from kopi luwak, we should also understand the economic and political realities that fuel its production—and focus on fixing a coffee industry that enables the exploitation of both the animals and the humans who rely on them.