If you are squeamish, you might want to skip this post and move on to Singapore.

If you have seen Jack Nicholson in Bucket List, you have heard of Civet Cat coffee or kopi luwak.  Kopi is the Indonesian word for coffee and Luwak is the local name of the civet cat who eats the red coffee “cherries” as part of its usual diet.  The cat excretes the beans intact, but the enzymes in the stomach of the civet adds to the coffee’s flavor through fermentation of some type.  Some argue that the civet cat also chooses to eat only certain cherries which also adds to the flavor.

The locals collect the feces from civet cats who live around the coffee plantations.  This is cleaned, processed, and turned into the most expensive coffee in the world.  During our tours, we were able to buy some of this coffee as beans, but we did not find anywhere to actually sample the drink.  We’ve heard people call it “cat poop-accino”.

I read that the traditional methods of gathering the feces is being replaced by intensive farming methods where the animals are kept in cages and fed the coffee cherries.  I hope our sample came from “free range” civet cats.