happened like this. I’d spent most of 1981 in London serving my coffee taster’s apprenticeship with various City merchants, and I passed some of my spare time researching in the library of the International Coffee Organization. One day I pulled a back copy of National Geographic magazine off the shelf. In it I found a full-length feature about Sumatran coffee, and one paragraph caught my eye – a reference to the author being served a sublime coffee made from beans that had been digested in the stomach of a small weasel-like wild animal called a luwak. These luwaks prowled the plantations at night selecting to eat, in time-honoured fashion, ‘only the finest, ripest coffee cherries’, which were then digested by the animal, evacuated, collected, washed and roasted. I mentally filed this curious tale and forgot about it, until nearly ten years later when I was on the phone with a particularly persistent Swiss coffee trader who was trying as usual to sell me some coffee that I didn’t need. ‘Get me some kopi luwak,’ I said to distract him, ‘I’ll buy that …!’ I explained to him exactly what it was, and where it was to be found: he had been duly amazed and amused, and I had thought no more about it. Three months had passed when he called to announce, ‘Mr Wild! I have a kilo of kopi luwak for you!’
Of all the remarkable coffees I had ever bought, this small bag of kopi luwak generated the most interest by far. The press and public couldn’t get enough of the story. I found out, to my amazement and shock, that what had been once an almost unheard-of delicacy that I had introduced more or less on a whim had become the must-have coffee on the books of many aspiring specialist green coffee trading companies both in Europe and the United States. It had even made an appearance in a Hollywood film; in The Bucket List, a terminally ailing Morgan Freeman brings some for a similarly ailing Jack Nicholson to taste.
As a consequence of all this attention, demand for kopi luwak had soared, and to meet it, wild luwaks were being coaxed onto Sumatran coffee farms to gorge themselves on coffee cherries and produce more crap. An American company had artificially synthesised the flavour imparted by this unorthodox ‘processing’ and licensed a roaster to use it. Far from recoiling in horror, discerning consumers at that time were falling over themselves to taste kopi luwak. A long way from the days when I was the only one willing to drink it, I thought almost fondly, dazzled by the success of my protégé, and wondering idly how this demand was met by the 500 kilos the roasters still proclaimed were collected in the wild each year.
Many other aspects of today’s speciality coffee market amaze me, too. The coffees that I introduced to the startled British public for the first time twenty-five years ago – St Helena Island, Yemeni Mocha Matari, Jamaica Blue Mountain Peaberry, Cuba Crystal Mountain and Harrar Longberry – would now appear really quite run-of-the-mill to the so-called ‘Third Wave’ coffee traders and roasters, focused as they are on individual plantations and plant varietals, along with exceptional husbandry and processing. And they have developed a range of coffee vocabulary far beyond that with which I was apprenticed, to go with their expertise.
But in one respect little has changed since this book was first published: the myths about the history of the coffee trade that are endlessly repeated and recycled by the trade itself are as flawed and derivative as they ever were. When this book was first published in 2003, one of my aims was, as far as possible, to set the historical record straight. The first edition of this book was published in the UK and USA, and translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, Turkish and Vietnamese, so it was hardly an obscure tome. Yet it is still possible to read abject nonsense about the history of coffee on a million coffee trade websites as though its true heritage had never existed. It seems that all the care and attention to detail that is lavished on the other aspects of the coffee trade goes out of the window when it comes to discussing its roots in our past. No one, for example, even seems to have noticed the significance of the find at Kush mentioned in the last chapter.
The book also concerns the economic, environmental and political aspects of the coffee trade. When I was first writing it in 2001/2, world coffee prices were at an all-time low and the human suffering this caused to those working at the most basic level of the trade was immense. Some critics called the approach I took in this book anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, and back then, when economies in the developed world were booming, such an approach was distinctly unfashionable. We live in a very different world to that following the economic crash of 2008, and since then the capitalist model has been under question in a way it has rarely been before. In my pioneering coffee days I was said to be ahead of my time: unfortunately it seems that, with regard this book, my time has finally come, and what I forecasted back then with some foreboding is actually happening now.
So what happened next to my pet rarity cum superstar, kopi luwak? When looking into this coffee and its origins, I quickly came to realise that I had inadvertently created a monster. An article in the Guardian had appeared, exposing, to my horror, the horrendous practice of caging wild luwaks in racks of crude metal cages, where they were force-fed coffee cherries simply to make the prized beans. The journalist claimed that the production of kopi luwak in this intensive, battery fashion was not just confined to Indonesia, but had also been adopted by other South East Asian coffee origins too, such as the Philippines, India, Vietnam and Thailand.
Then out of the blue I received an email from my literary agent. The BBC had come across this book when they were looking for a coffee expert for a programme they were thinking of making, she wrote. What’s the programme about? I replied. Something called kopi luwak, came the reply. Have you heard of it?
So it was that, five months later, in June 2013, I found myself in Medan, Sumatra, in the utterly unfamiliar role of undercover reporter alongside the experienced BBC investigative journalist Guy Lynn, secretly recording interviews with coffee exporters as part of the BBC World Our World investigation into the truth about the kopi luwak trade. I was there in the guise of a director of a (virtual, i.e. non-existent) UK coffee company to provide specialist knowledge of the coffee trade, so that we’d appear to know what we were talking about. After expressing an interest in buying large quantities of genuine wild kopi luwak, we accompanied one trader to Takengon, in Aceh Province, a supposed centre of kopi luwak production. He wanted to demonstrate to us how the coffee he was proposing to sell us was all sourced from wild luwaks living in the virgin forests of the nearby Gayo Highlands. It was a gruelling fifteen hours’ drive from Medan, and when we arrived, we were supposed to go to our hotel to meet up with Chris Rogers, another BBC reporter who would be presenting the finished programme. He had already been there for a few days, secretly filming caged luwaks. As we arrived in the Takengon centre, our driver was flagged down by a man standing in the deserted midnight street. Curiously, he seemed to be expecting us, and after a hasty conversation in Indonesian, we were told that we needed to go to a different hotel to the one we had booked. We went along with the change of plan: the proposed hotel looked OK, and even though Chris was for some unexplained reason still at the original hotel, I was past caring about the whys and wherefores. I collapsed exhausted into bed – only to be woken by a phone call about ten minutes later.
‘Pack your bags and meet me in the lobby!’ Guy’s voice whispered. ‘Our guy has threatened to shoot Chris’s driver. He waved a gun at him!’
He added that I had to destroy the notes that I had made (he’d seen me writing on my iPad non-stop) and I obeyed, grumpily, mourning the tragic loss to travel literature. I was also to give him the recording and camera equipment. This was the same equipment I had been asked to carry all the way from London and smuggle through Medan customs to avoid the attention of the Indonesian authorities who weren’t too keen on unauthorised journalists roaming around their country, apparently. That’s why I had to destroy my notes, incidentally: they were potentially evidence of our nefarious activities.
‘Have we been rumbled?’ I asked Guy five minutes later when I met him in the lobby. He didn’t seem to hear me. He was too busy talking in full-on emergency mode on a satellite phone to some senior producer at the BBC in London. I’d signed all the BBC Health and Safety Compliance forms before we left, but none of them mentioned what the appropriate
