It turns out that the world’s most expensive coffee is made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of an Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). A cup of Kopi Luwak as the resulting java is called can sell for 50 times what a regular will set you back. Traditionally, the civets roamed coffee bean plantations, picking and eating the ripest coffee cherries off the ground, digesting the surrounding fruit and leaving the beans behind in their droppings. The digestive enzymes of the civet purportedly process the beans giving them their smooth and deep flavor. Plantation workers collected the droppings as a by product of normal coffee production. That is mostly in the past, today your average coffee civets are confined to cages and fed mostly coffee cherries raising concerns about their welfare and corruption of the process.
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Scientific Articles:
CARDER ETAL 2016 lee etal 2015 marcone 2004
