Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/673312
April 2016 47 It's just after the break of dawn, and like tiny groups of shadows fading into the morning mist still covering the deep blue mountains in the Kintamani highlands of northeastern Bali, the coffee growers are hunting for easy prey as they silently whisker through the farms. Carefully lift- ing up branches on the trees, they survey the ground beneath their every step. Not missing a single leaf or ground around the stem of the coffee trees they search for the droppings of sacred beans defe- cated and left behind by the Asian Palm Civet. A few are traders or civilians from nearby villages, but the vast majority are small-holder coffee farmers. All of them are Luwak coffee hunters in the search for what, on average, equals a couple of kilo- grams parchment beans per farmer during an entire harvest season, which will earn them the bonus that allows for families to buy school uniforms, books and shoes for their children's next academic year. "All our Luwak coffee here in Bali comes from wild Luwaks and is collected from the droppings the growers find in the farms or in nearby forest areas. This is the way Luwak coffee has always been produced in Indonesia ever since coffee was first planted," Wayan Sudani, a work- er at the Segara Windu Agro coffee farm on the slopes of the Kintamani volcano in Bali, told Tea & Coffee Trade Journal during a recent visit here. True to history, collecting the drop- pings left behind by the Asian Palm Civet, a small reddish-colored mammal that looks like a mix between a fox and a cat, go all the way back to the begin- ning of coffee cultivation in Indonesia over 300 years ago. Since commercial coffee production took off in the early 18 th century, the Dutch colonial regime prohibited workers or local farmers to pick any coffee for their personal con- sumption. But to offer local communities some incentive to work on the planta- tions, Dutch rules established that while all the fruit on the trees were for the colonial masters exclusively, fruit that had fallen to the ground could be collected for the workers themselves. This system was formalized through the cultivation system known as the Cultuurstelsel leg- islation implemented between the 1830s and 1850s, historical research shows. The native Indonesian Pribumi people, who dominated the Indonesian islands at the time and whose name Pribumi is based on a lose Dutch translation of the native meaning "Sons of the land," were quick to identify the unusual aromatics of the coffee beans that had passed through the Luwak's digestive system. "The local farmers started to quickly notice that the coffee collected from the droppings of the Luwak had much more flavor than the coffee collected from the regular beans from cherries that had fallen to the ground," said Nyoman Mangku, a tour guide turned coffee fanatic who is based in the tourist center of Ubud in southern Bali. "But even if we have had the Luwak coffee across Indonesia for hundreds of years, it wasn't until the 1980s when tourism really started to grow in Bali that we started to see the surge in demand and interest in this coffee," said Nyoman, who as part of the Bali Hai Tour agency has specialized in taking visiting tourists out to farms and small-holder coffee growers in the Kintamani region to show how the civet coffee is processed first hand. Controversial Specialty Bean When it comes to the unique flavor of Luwak coffee, many specialty buyers and roasters agree that the enhanced smooth- ness, and floral and fruity notes these rare beans are known for, owe to the fermentation process that takes place after the elusive animal eats the red cherries. Once the Luwak has munched off the fruit meat and pulp, the beans–still intact within the parchment–are fermented in a combination that not only removes the mucilage but also has stomach enzymes breaking down the protein molecules that can give coffee a bitter taste in the final cup. Collecting wild animal coffee from droppings is nothing new. Coffee cherries, at the stage of perfect maturation, are nat- urally sweet, and animals have been eating the red fruits right off tree branches for centuries. But from elephants in Tanzania and Thailand to monkeys in India and goats in Ethiopia, it was the Indonesians that eyed the additional value of putting a picture of the Luwak on tiny bags sold in gourmet sections at retail stores across the U.S. and Europe when the specialty market took off in earnest in the mid- 1990s. Also known as the "cat-poop cof- fee" in popular talk, a tiny pack of about 100 grams of Luwak beans typically costs between USD $40 and $80 in the U.S. retail market. "Elsewhere in the world, jacu birds, bats and other wild creatures pro- duce similar animal coffee, but Kopi Luwak is the most famous example of a Luwak Coffee, from animal droppings to clean green coffee.