for Taylors, where I’d disappear to far-off lands with nothing more than a cheery wave. I could have been captured by Danakil tribesmen and sold into white slavery – or worse – for all the company knew. Different days.
The long and the short of the matter was that it turned out we’d become enmeshed in some kopi luwak mafia turf war, and far from being rumbled, we had been treated as potentially serious buyers. Chris’s driver’s unexplained presence had been interpreted by our guy as a threat from a commercial rival, and the gun routine was designed to force him to leave the town. In the end it was decided by the faceless voice back in London that we should act as if nothing untoward had taken place, and invent a reason for returning to Medan urgently. So we ended up making a swift exit in our gun-toting trader friend’s 4X4 via a token visit to some entirely spurious wild kopi luwak collecting ‘farm’ which appeared to have been hired for the day as set dressing by our friend, for whom I had by now conceived a distinct loathing.
I finally caught a glimpse of the ravishing, almost Alpine lakeside setting of Takengon as we left to drive the fifteen hours back to Medan. The trader’s choice of a particularly ear-piercing, mind-frazzling, boom-boom Indonesian electro music to play on his CD player seemed designed to add torture to the excitement of the previous night. Even the back of his head (I was seated behind him) assumed a vile aspect. What did I think of kopi luwak at this point? That it was just coffee’s dark history run amok.
The programme was finally screened in September 2013 (you can still watch it on YouTube. WARNING: some of the footage is distressing) and made waves across the kopi luwak as well as the wider coffee trade.
During the months before we left for Indonesia that we spent researching the programme, I’d quickly come to realise that the Guardian report was broadly correct and that the fiction that kopi luwak is a wild-sourced, incredibly rare coffee is maintained even after the coffee arrives in the consuming markets. Some exporters provide certificates of origin to support their claims, but if you examine them closely, they provide no reassurance that the coffee originates from wild animals, only from a certain plantation or district. In turn these certificates can often be used by importing companies to persuade their roaster and retailer clients that they are buying the real deal. I can’t count the number of times I heard the term ‘trusted supplier’ from people in the trade, knowing in some cases that beyond a shadow of doubt the supplier in question was buying coffee from caged luwaks. Retailers, importers, exporters all passed the buck back down the line, but in the actual place where the buck stops, at origin, nine times out of ten I suspected that the coffee was coming from caged luwaks. But even if you visit a plantation, you can’t be sure that what you’re being told is true – just watch the BBC programme and you’ll see that one particular estate I visited producing so-called wild kopi luwak later reluctantly admitted that they had luwaks in cages, although only when faced with incontrovertible evidence from the BBC. There was neither sight nor sound of the luwaks while I was actually there – and I was actively looking for them. That’s the key problem faced by buyers trying to source genuine wild kopi luwak: producers know the process of production is controversial, so they conceal the ugly truth. And the buyers, whether in the know or not, prefer not to look too hard.
Once back in the UK, I timed the launch of my Facebook campaign, which I had titled ‘Kopi Luwak: Cut the Crap’, to coincide with the programme, created to encourage an independent certification for genuine wild kopi luwak. This is the only way it seemed to me that all links in the supply chain could guarantee authenticity, and might eventually lead to a falling off in consumption of kopi luwak.
The super-premium price that kopi luwak commands is sustained by two myths: one, that the coffee comes from the digestive tract of a wild animal freely roaming the plantations at night and selecting only the finest, ripest cherries; and secondly, that only 500 kilos of this rarest of coffees are collected annually.
Both claims are demonstrably false.
If the second isn’t true, it makes the first irrelevant. Estimates of the real annual crop vary wildly, but I know for sure that the UK trade alone accounts for over two tonnes annually, and one kopi luwak farm I visited proudly boasted that it produced 1.6 tonnes per annum from a hundred enclosed animals. One UK roaster that claimed to be incredibly scrupulous about only sourcing genuine wild kopi luwak and carried the usual ‘Only 500 kilos …’ claim on its packaging, grudgingly admitted to me they were selling over a tonne of their kopi luwak a year.
Now that the fact that much of the coffee comes from caged or enclosed luwaks has been exposed, those suppliers who unwillingly admit this have started to claim that it doesn’t matter, because their luwaks are well looked after, their cages are clean and suchlike. Animal welfare experts, however, say that there is no such thing as a well looked-after luwak: they are solitary, nocturnal wild animals that become immensely stressed when kept in the company of others. To my surprise, no one seemed to mention anything about the effect of caffeine on the creatures, nor could I find any research on the matter. So using the tried-and-tested scientific technique known technically as a ‘back of an envelope’ calculation, I started to work it out myself. I knew that the usual amount of coffee cherry that luwaks are fed daily on a farm is about 1.5 kilos. Although the bean itself passes through their system, I worked out that the flesh of the cherry alone contains the caffeine equivalent of 120 espressos a day. That’s consumed by a luwak, a small mammal. Imagine the effect of 120 espressos on a fully grown adult human – it hardly bears considering. In addition, anecdotal evidence suggests that luwaks suffer from caffeine-induced calcium deficiency, and blood in their scats, frequently dying within a year or so of captivity. And I’ve even seen for myself one wretched animal in a half-hectare enclosure with a hundred other luwaks so distressed that it had gnawed off its own foot. I repeat: gnawed off its own foot. Correct me if I’m wrong, but not even your most hyped-up, caffeine-addicted office colleague has ever been driven to such gruesome excess.
There are genuine producers of wild kopi luwak, though. They are mostly smallholders in remoter districts, and for them – given world coffee prices at the moment – the popularity of kopi luwak is a valuable source of income. Inevitably this has led to fraud and corruption, but if a genuine independent certification scheme were available to these genuine producers, it would not only protect their source of income but would help protect the wild luwaks and their forest habitat, too. Frequently jungle areas bordering remote coffee-growing districts are under threat of illegal logging, precisely because they are far away from the not-very-watchful eye.
That’s why as well as exposing the cruelty of caged coffee production, my ‘Kopi Luwak: Cut the Crap’ campaign lobbied for the creation of such a scheme. I was supported in this by the World Animal Protection organisation in the UK. We had our first break when we mounted a petition on Change.org, which resulted in Harrods being forced to abandon one of their suppliers who had in turn been supplied by an Indonesian company that had been exposed on the BBC programme. Harvey Nichols and Selfridges soon followed suit, as did other major retailers internationally. After that we shifted our attention to the major coffee certifiers – UTZ and Rainforest Alliance – which were in danger of inadvertently altering their code of practice in such a way that would allow caged kopi luwak to be produced on estates that they had certified sustainable. To our relief, we managed to successfully lobby these bodies against this potentially disastrous move.
Meanwhile, the Indonesian government said that it regarded genuine wild kopi luwak as ‘a national treasure’ and was working towards the creation of certification – conveniently failing to note that the government’s own estates in East Java were a major promoter of caged kopi luwak. At the time, I did another back-of-an-envelope exercise with a trader familiar with these large estates. We worked out that when coffee prices were low, their kopi luwak sales were worth more to the government than all the top-quality, much sought-after coffee produced on its hundreds of hectares. He also told me that if a certification problem arose, the government would simply move the caged kopi luwak production off the estate in question.
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