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. 2021 Jun 9;10(6):1329.
doi: 10.3390/foods10061329.

Digested Civet Coffee Beans (Kopi Luwak)-An Unfortunate Trend in Specialty Coffee Caused by Mislabeling of Coffea liberica?

Dirk W Lachenmeier  1 , Steffen Schwarz  2
Affiliations

Digested Civet Coffee Beans (Kopi Luwak)-An Unfortunate Trend in Specialty Coffee Caused by Mislabeling of Coffea liberica?

Dirk W Lachenmeier et al. Foods. .

Abstract

In the context of animal protection, the trend of digested coffees such as Kopi Luwak produced by civet cats in captivity should not be endorsed. Previous studies on such coffees may have been flawed by sample selection and misclassification. As wild civets may prefer Coffea liberica beans, due to their higher sugar content, the chemical differences may be caused by the Coffea species difference combined with a careful selection of ripe, defect-free cherries by the animals, rather than changes caused by digestion. This may also explain the observed differences between Kopi Luwak from wild civets (mainly C. liberica) compared to the one from animals in captivity (typically fed with C. arabica and/or C. canephora).

Keywords: Kopi Luwak; civet; coffee; fermentation; gastrointestinal tract.

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Conflict of interest statement

S.S. is owner of Coffee Consulate, Mannheim, Germany. Coffee Consulate is an independent training and research center. Coffee Consulate is not commercializing digested coffees. Therefore, S.S. reports no conflicts of interest related to the work under consideration. D.W.L. declares no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Photographs of coffees claimed as being digested: (a) Kopi Luwak coffee beans (claimed as being Coffea canephora var. robusta), (b) Nekemte-African Civet coffee beans, and (c) Abdela-African Civet coffee beans. Photographs of non-digested coffees for comparison: (d) Coffea liberica, (e) Coffea canephora var. Old Paradenia (India), and (f) Coffea arabica var. Catuaí Vermelho (Brasil). ((a–c) reprinted with graphical improvement (background and noise removed) from Food Research International, 37, Massimo F. Marcone, Composition and properties of Indonesian palm civet coffee (Kopi Luwak) and Ethiopian civet coffee, pp. 901–912 [3], Copyright (2004), with permission from Elsevier. (d–f) are original photographs).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Civet kept caged for Kopi Luwak production (attribution: author Surtr, (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luwak_(civet_cat)_in_cage.jpg accessed on 8 June 2021) license CC BY-SA 2.0, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ accessed on 8 June 2021) via Wikimedia Commons).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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