Musk Coffee Kopi Luwak is full of fakes. How to tell the true from the false?

If you want to make money, don't be afraid to get dirty. The most expensive coffee in the world is feces; this is not an opinion but a fact. To make civet coffee, you have to get high-quality coffee beans; then you have to feed them to civet cats and collect the beans after they pass through their digestive system. After washing, fermentation, drying, roasting, grinding and brewing, these beans become coffee that costs up to $80 per cup. The reason why coffee beans can be sold at such an exaggerated price is that after chemical reactions in the civets 'stomachs, the flavor of coffee beans is greatly upgraded.

Due to the high price, there are many fake or adulterated civet coffee on the market, and there is no reliable method to test the authenticity before. In the past, buyers might have relied on taste to decide they had been cheated, but there was no way to prove it. Eiichiro fukuzaki of osaka university in japan decided to change that. He and colleagues in Japan and Indonesia have developed a chemical test they believe can effectively test the authenticity of civet coffee.

Dr fukuzaki gathered lots of civet droppings and common coffee beans from bali, java and sumatra, roasted at 205 degrees celsius and ground to a powder. But instead of putting ground coffee into the coffee, he mixed it with distilled water, methanol and chloroform to extract the chemicals that gave it its flavor, and then analyzed the extract by gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.

The results showed that the flavor of Civet coffee mainly came from four components: citric acid, malic acid, pyroglutamic acid and inositol. Real civet coffee contains much more of the first two substances than similar, but undigested, coffee beans, and the latter two substances in different proportions. In addition, due to the large difference, even if the real coffee beans are mixed in a ratio of 1:1, the authenticity can be tested; in other words, this test method can not only distinguish fake civet coffee, but also distinguish counterfeit civet coffee.

It's unclear whether the method will identify a lower percentage of adulterated coffee, but if dr fukuzaki's test is widely adopted, it should lead to a significant reduction in fakes in the civet coffee market. Counterfeit producers, on the other hand, may try to tweak their product formulations with chemicals; if they can make coffee beans with the same flavor, not only will civet coffee be much easier, but it will also make civet coffee affordable for ordinary people. (translated by Huang Weide)

Source: World Magazine