Being somebody who has always been a big fan of coffee, the opportunity of witnessing for myself how Luwak Coffee is produced was something that I wouldn’t want to miss out on when I went to Bali. After watching the Barong Dance in Batubulan, we stopped at a place called Wedang Sari – one of only a few farms in Bali that produce this famous Luwak Coffee.
To tell the truth, I had only heard about Luwak Coffee just a few years back when it made headlines on a Malaysian National TV news in regards to its halal-ness which was being questioned by the Muslims in Malaysia. I would say, the process of producing Luwak Coffee was very very interesting – if not disgusting. 😀
They’d let this civets (Luwak as it is called in Indonesia) eat raw coffee beans, knowing that the coffee beans would literally be intact by the digestion system of the animal and wait for it to poo the beans back out.
The freshly-pooed beans would then be scooped into a wok and then – cooking time! Ewwwww! LOL.
So, drinking Luwak coffee literally means drinking the poo of a Luwak. As simple as that. I can’t even make it sound any better than that. 😀
I don’t know what magic the animal does to the coffee beans while they are in its stomach but for sure the whole process of producing Luwak coffee has made it one of the most expensive coffee in the world.
If truth is to be told, I didn’t really feel anything special about the taste whatsoever when I had a taste of Luwak Coffee. Or even if there was, it must have been too ‘insignificant’ I wouldn’t be able to tell a Luwak coffee from a normal Balinese coffee.
The sampling (or rather, tasting) was one of the most interesting parts of the whole visit to the farm. They’d provide glasses of coffee and each glass is mixed with different ingredients – cinnamon, honey, lemon and ginger just to name a few.
I mean, too much of something would kill the taste and it really was true when it comes to tasting the coffee. The ingredients sort of killed the original taste so I didn’t really buy the idea of mixing the damn coffee with something stronger than the coffee itself.
But of course, the intention of the whole visit was to ‘lure’ you into buying their coffee products in the end.
Needless to say, the prices were eye-popping. 150 gram is sold at half a million rupees (RM175/ USD60). Mama mia! Thinking that I still had at least a few days to survive through in Bali, I don’t think it was a good idea to send that much on an animal’s poo. LOL!
So no thanks, but at least I had a taste of Luwak Coffee – the most expensive coffee in the world.
P/S : Please take not that I did this when I was still very much unaware of animal rights. Looking back at it now, I wouldn’t have been interested to go there at all, knowing that it was the worse kind of exploitation against animals. In order to keep up with the demands, they actually force-feed the luwaks, and they are to eat coffee beans way beyond their needs and probably against their willingness, in addition to the fact that they are caged in a very small confinement. It is very much cruel actually. Researches have proved that their digestion system does not really do much to the taste of the coffee and people are made to believe that it does – purely for commercial strategy. I am therefore calling for a boycott on this ill-gotten products because seriously – it is cruel and it is not worth the money you spend on it at all.
