Did You Know the World’s Most Expensive Coffee Comes from Cat Poop?

Yes, you read that right. The world’s priciest coffee is made from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a cat-like animal – and people pay top dollar for it. This infamous brew is called Kopi Luwak, often dubbed “cat poop coffee.” A single cup of Kopi Luwak can sell for as much as $80 in the U.S., and high-end retailers have charged hundreds of dollars per pound for these exotic beans. It’s a curiosity-driven delicacy that raises plenty of eyebrows (and questions): How on earth is coffee from cat droppings a thing? Why is it so expensive? Is it actually any good? Let’s dive into the bizarre backstory of Kopi Luwak – and why you might just be happier sipping a nice cup of tea by the end.

What Exactly Is "Cat Poop Coffee"?

Meet the source: An Asian palm civet, the catlike mammal responsible for producing Kopi Luwak. This small, nocturnal creature natively roams the coffee-growing regions of Southeast Asia (particularly Indonesia) and has a fondness for sweet, ripe coffee cherries. In the wild, civets scamper through coffee plantations at night, selectively eating the ripest coffee cherries as part of their varied diet. Here’s where it gets interesting (or cringe-worthy, depending on your perspective): the civet cannot digest the coffee bean inside the cherry, so it passes through their system mostly intact[4]. During this journey through the civet’s intestines, the bean undergoes a unique natural process – fermentation by digestive enzymes – which proponents claim enhances the coffee’s flavor by breaking down proteins and reducing bitterness.

How is Kopi Luwak made? The production process can be summarized in a few unbelievable steps:

1.    Civet Snacks on Coffee Cherries: Wild civets (or sometimes caged ones, as we’ll discuss later) gobble up ripe coffee cherries for dinner. They digest the fleshy fruit but not the hard bean inside.

2.    Nature’s Fermentation Tank: As the beans sit in the civet’s digestive tract, they ferment. The civet’s gut enzymes seep into the beans, purportedly smoothing out the flavor by removing some acidity and bitterness.

3.    The… uh, Extraction: After about a day, the civet excretes the coffee beans – now covered in fecal matter along with other digested remains. Essentially, the beans come out in clumps of civet poop.

4.    Collection and Cleaning: Farmers or foragers collect these droppings from the forest floor or civet enclosures. The beans are painstakingly picked out, washed and cleaned (you can bet thoroughly cleaned!) to remove all excrement.

5.    Roasting and Brewing: Once dried and cleaned, the beans are roasted like any other coffee. Finally, they’re ground and brewed to make a cup of coffee that’s truly one-of-a-kind.

It’s a wild process to wrap your head around. The name “Kopi Luwak” itself comes from Indonesian: kopi means coffee, and luwak is the local name for the Asian palm civet. Originally discovered in Indonesia in the 19th century, this coffee was first brewed by local farmers who gathered civet droppings around colonial coffee plantations. Little did they know their improvisation to make use of discarded beans would one day spawn a luxury product.

Why Is Kopi Luwak So Expensive?

Considering its unappetizing origin, one might wonder why anyone would pay a premium for Kopi Luwak. Yet this coffee has been marketed as an exclusive luxury – and the prices truly reflect that. Kopi Luwak has been called “the Holy Grail of coffees” and indeed ranks among the most expensive coffees in the world. Here are the key reasons behind its sky-high price tag:

• Scarcity of Supply: By its nature, production is limited. Historically, wild-sourced Kopi Luwak required trudging through jungle or plantation underbrush to find civet droppings and extract the beans – a labor-intensive treasure hunt. Even with today’s farming of civets, only a small quantity of beans can be produced, contributing to its rarity. In one estimate, genuinely wild-collected civet coffee was selling for up to $1,300 per kilogram (roughly $600 per pound) because it’s so hard to come by. More commonly, farmed Kopi Luwak might fetch around $100 per kilogram, but the truly “authentic” wild stuff is extremely scarce and thus outrageously pricey.

• Labor-Intensive Process: As noted, every step – from gathering the droppings to cleaning and roasting – requires significant manual effort. Workers must literally hand-pick beans out of animal feces. It’s not exactly something you can mass-produce on an assembly line. This arduous process (whether done in the wild or on farms) adds to the cost. Small production quantities and lots of labor input naturally drive up the price of the final product.

• Novelty and Hype: Perhaps the biggest factor is simply the story. Kopi Luwak’s mystique as “the coffee made from cat poop” is a marketing goldmine. It’s a novelty item that curious connoisseurs and thrill-seeking foodies want to try at least once. This supply-and-demand dynamic, fueled by the coffee’s quirky reputation, allows sellers to charge exorbitant prices. “In this case, quality is not the driving factor for price… It’s supply, demand and hype,” notes one coffee consultant. Indeed, at one point Kopi Luwak was commanding around $250 per pound simply because people were willing to pay for the novelty. When something is touted as exclusive and only produced in tiny amounts, there will always be enthusiasts (or the merely curious) ready to open their wallets.

• Perceived Unique Flavor: Supporters argue that the civet’s digestion imparts a flavor profile you can’t get from any other coffee. Descriptions often mention a smoother, less bitter taste with unique earthy or chocolatey undertones. This allure of a distinctive taste – essentially a “naturally refined” coffee bean – has helped justify the high cost to buyers seeking the next gourmet experience. (We’ll discuss in a moment whether the taste really lives up to the legend.)

To put the cost in perspective, a single cup of Kopi Luwak brewed at a café can range from $35 to $80. That’s about 10-20 times the price of a typical cup of coffee. Clearly, this is not your everyday Starbucks order – it’s often treated as a bucket-list experience or a lavish gift item. Speaking of bucket lists, Kopi Luwak even made its way into Hollywood: in the 2007 movie “The Bucket List,” a billionaire character insists on drinking his precious Kopi Luwak daily, only to later learn (to his disgust) that his elite coffee comes from civet droppings. The absurdity of cat-poop coffee has firmly cemented itself in pop culture.

Ethical Concerns and Controversy

As demand for Kopi Luwak spiked over the years, a darker side to this luxury coffee has come to light. The ethical concerns surrounding civet coffee are significant, and they’ve led many animal welfare advocates and informed consumers to question whether that exotic cup is worth it.

In the early days, all Kopi Luwak was wild-collected – essentially a by-product of wild civets roaming free. Farmers would gather whatever the civets left behind on the plantations. If that were the whole story, Kopi Luwak might be a quaint oddity. Unfortunately, money talks. When the world proved willing to pay $100+ for a small bag of these beans, enterprising producers sought to ramp up production. This gave rise to intensive civet farming: capturing civets and keeping them in captivity to harvest their poop on a schedule.

Animal Cruelty Issues: Investigations by journalists and animal rights groups have uncovered grim conditions on many civet coffee farms. Thousands of palm civets are kept in cages akin to battery cages used in industrial egg farming. Often, the cages are cramped, dirty, and devoid of any environmental enrichment. Civets—naturally solitary, tree-dwelling creatures—endure extreme stress in confinement. They are frequently force-fed almost exclusively coffee cherries to maximize output. This unbalanced diet and stressful environment leads to many civets becoming sick, injured, or displaying neurotic behaviors. Video footage released by PETA in 2013, for example, showed caged civets compulsively pacing, biting their cage bars, and losing patches of fur – clear signs of distress. One researcher described some farms where “the cages were literally the tiniest – we’d call them rabbit hutches – absolutely soaked with urine and droppings”, noting the animals had nowhere to escape the filthy wire floors, causing constant pain. Mortality rates in such facilities are high, and wild populations are threatened as more civets are trapped to supply these farms.

“Fake” Wild Coffee: Another layer of controversy is fraud and mislabeling. Because of the backlash against caged-civet coffee, some sellers market their Kopi Luwak as “wild-sourced”, implying the beans were collected from free-roaming civets. In reality, there is often no reliable way for consumers to know if that premium bag labeled “wild” is truly from wild droppings or just a product of a cruel civet farm. A BBC undercover investigation in 2013 famously revealed that coffee from caged civets was being packaged and sold in Europe as “wild” Kopi Luwak. With huge profits on the line, dishonest producers have every incentive to slap a “100% Wild” label on their factory-farmed beans. Unfortunately, no official certification exists to guarantee authenticity or animal welfare standards in Kopi Luwak production. In fact, major sustainable agriculture organizations (like Rainforest Alliance and UTZ) refuse to certify any civet coffee at all, due to the inherent animal welfare issues.

Even the Original Promoter Renounced It: In a twist, one of Kopi Luwak’s early champions in the West – coffee executive Tony Wild, who is credited with introducing it to European markets – has since become an outspoken critic. Disturbed by the industrialization and cruelty, he now urges people to stop buying civet coffee. Wild even launched a campaign bluntly called “Cut the Crap” to spread awareness that this luxury coffee isn’t worth the suffering behind it. When the guy who literally made Kopi Luwak famous turns against it, you know there’s a serious problem.

Is Any Kopi Luwak Ethical? There are a few producers who claim to operate wildlife-friendly collections – essentially, maintaining protected forest areas and paying locals to gather naturally dropped civet poop, without cages. If true, that approach avoids cruelty (and those beans often taste better, since truly wild civets eat a mixed diet and only the best cherries). However, given how difficult and costly it is to gather enough beans this way, such supplies are extremely limited. Many experts believe most Kopi Luwak on the market today comes from caged civets, regardless of what the label says. Unless you personally visit a source and verify their practices, buying civet coffee is a gamble in terms of ethics.

In short, the “world’s most expensive coffee” comes with a hefty moral price. Knowing what we do about how it’s often produced, a lot of coffee lovers simply lose their appetite for Kopi Luwak. But even setting aside the ethical dilemmas – what about the coffee itself? Novelty aside, is it actually a good cup of coffee?

Does It Actually Taste Good?

Here’s the million-dollar question (or should we say $80-a-cup question): Is Kopi Luwak actually delicious, or is it all just clever marketing? For years, the coffee’s mystique carried an assumption that it must be amazing – why else would anyone bother collecting beans from civet droppings? But when put to the test, many coffee experts have found Kopi Luwak underwhelming. In fact, a lot of aficionados openly deride it as a gimmick.

Within the specialty coffee industry, the consensus is that Kopi Luwak’s reputation far exceeds its reality. The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) even stated that there’s a “general consensus within the industry… it just tastes bad.” Harsh, right? Professional cuppers (coffee tasters) who have done side-by-side comparisons often report that civet-processed beans brew a coffee that’s thin-bodied, flat, and missing the desirable high notes of good coffee. The digestive process that supposedly smooths the flavor also strips away many of the acids and aromatics that give coffee its complexity. One food writer who reviewed several Kopi Luwak samples available to American consumers quipped that “It tasted just like… Folgers. Stale. Lifeless. Petrified dinosaur droppings steeped in bathtub water. I couldn’t finish it.” – Ouch!

Even blind taste tests don’t rate Kopi Luwak very highly. ABC’s Nightline organized a tasting where coffee experts sampled a variety of high-end coffees (without knowing which was which). The result: Kopi Luwak ranked only 4th out of 6 coffees. It was beaten by far cheaper coffees in flavor. This lines up with what Rocky Rhodes, a noted coffee consultant, observed: “Quality is not the driving factor for price… It’s … hype.” In other words, people are paying for the novelty and rarity, not because Kopi Luwak is the pinnacle of taste.

None of this is to say every cup of civet coffee is terrible – taste is subjective, after all. Some drinkers do report that it’s a smooth, mild cup with low bitterness. The civet’s natural selection of only ripe cherries and the fermentation does reduce bitterness, which might make it appealing to those who dislike acidic or bold coffee. However, the flip side is that it can be kind of bland. Most coffee connoisseurs will tell you that a well-grown, well-roasted bean from a good farm (that hasn’t been pooped out by an animal) will easily rival or beat Kopi Luwak on flavor – at a fraction of the price. In summary, when it comes to taste, Kopi Luwak is more of a novelty brew than a knockout.

Public Fascination and Reactions

It’s easy to see why Kopi Luwak captures public imagination: it’s the perfect blend of shock value and luxury. The idea of “cat poop coffee” makes people laugh, cringe, and morbidly curious all at once. Over the years, this coffee has been featured on countless travel shows, news articles, and social media posts – usually with a mix of awe and disgust. How do everyday folks feel about it? Reactions tend to fall into a few camps:

• “I have to try it (at least once)!” – There’s a subset of adventurous foodies and status-seekers who are excited to brag that they’ve tasted the world’s weirdest, most expensive coffee. It’s the same impulse that leads people to try fugu (poisonous pufferfish sushi) or $1000 gold-flecked desserts. For these curious souls, Kopi Luwak is a bucket-list experience. Coffee tour operators in Indonesia report that many tourists specifically ask to sample “that poop coffee.” They’ll shell out $50 for a cup just to say they did. It’s an experience to be Instagrammed, a story to tell friends back home. Some actually enjoy the coffee; others just enjoy the idea of it.

• “Ew, no thanks!” – For many others, once they learn how Kopi Luwak is made, the reaction is pure revulsion. After all, the first association is feces, not flavor. As one travel writer put it, the thing we usually feel “disgusted about at even the mention of it” is being used to make our favorite beverage. Plenty of coffee drinkers gag at the concept and have zero interest in tasting it – even if it’s safe and thoroughly cleaned. And when people find out about the animal cruelty aspects, any curiosity often turns into boycotts and vocal criticism. Animal welfare organizations have actively urged travelers to avoid civet coffee farms and not encourage that trade. The general sentiment among this group: “No animal should suffer for my cup of coffee, especially if it’s not even that good!”

• “Is this a joke or scam?” – There’s also skepticism. Some think the entire Kopi Luwak craze is basically a clever scam playing on shock value. They’re not entirely wrong – as noted, even industry experts have called it a cynical marketing gimmick. When a product’s chief appeal is that it came out of a critter’s backside, it does invite a healthy dose of side-eye. There are jokes that Kopi Luwak is the ultimate embodiment of “paying for crap.” Comedians and late-night hosts have had field days riffing on it. Yet, the very absurdity keeps the public talking about it, which in turn fuels more curiosity. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of hype.

To capitalize on the curiosity, some coffee shops and sellers really play up the novelty in their marketing. Pictured above: A window display in a high-end coffee shop showcasing Kopi Luwak. You can see the unroasted beans still in clumped form (yes, those are the fecal clumps at bottom), alongside cleaned green beans (left) and roasted beans (right). By displaying the whole “before and after” of civet coffee, sellers emphasize how special (and rare) it is – almost daring the customer to get past the ick factor. For a lot of folks, that dare is intriguing enough to draw them in at least once.

At the end of the day, Kopi Luwak’s notoriety is its biggest asset and its biggest curse. It guarantees attention – which is why you’re reading this blog, after all! – but it’s also destined to be a niche product. Most people will never try it, and many who do will only do it one time for the novelty. Some dedicated coffee enthusiasts frankly wish the public fascination would fade so that civets wouldn’t be exploited anymore for a fad. Whether you find it fascinating, gross, or a bit of both, Kopi Luwak undeniably makes for a great conversation over… Well, maybe not coffee. How about over a nice cup of tea?

A More Ethical, Flavorful Alternative: Tea Time

After exploring the strange world of cat poop coffee, you might be thinking, “Perhaps I’ll stick to beverages that don’t involve animal excrement, thank you very much.” You wouldn’t be alone. For those who crave luxury in a cup but without the ethical quandaries (or the hefty price tag), consider turning to the ancient delight of tea. High-quality teas have long offered a premium, complex sipping experience – no civets required! – and often come with rich traditions and ethical sourcing that make them a feel-good indulgence.

Why might tea be a better choice for a refined palate? For starters, tea offers incredible diversity: from delicate white teas and floral oolongs to robust black teas and rare aged pu-erhs. A connoisseur can explore flavor notes just as intricate as those in wine or coffee, ranging from honeyed sweetness to malty depth, brisk astringency to herbal freshness. And unlike Kopi Luwak, the production of fine tea is generally a harmonious process – one that involves skilled craftsmanship but doesn’t rely on caging wild animals or any gimmicky origin story.

Moreover, premium teas are often sourced with ethics and sustainability in mind. Many tea growers and vendors emphasize organic cultivation, fair trade labor practices, and environmental stewardship. For example, some specialty tea companies offer estate-grown leaves and Fair-Trade certified teas to ensure quality and ethical standards. When you purchase a top-notch Darjeeling or a rare Taiwanese oolong, you can appreciate that its value comes from the terroir and the artisanship, not from an animal’s digestive tract.

Finally, there’s the simple pleasure factor. A cup of excellent tea can be profoundly satisfying – warming, aromatic, and calming. It engages the senses and invites you to slow down, much like a fine wine or a great coffee. But with tea, you can savor luxury on a daily basis without the side serving of shock or guilt. Even the most expensive teas (say, a first flush Darjeeling or a handmade Gyokuro) cost only a fraction of what Kopi Luwak does per cup, and many tea drinkers would argue the experience is far superior.

So, if this tale of cat poop coffee has left you a bit incredulous or squeamish, why not cleanse your palate with an elegant cup of tea? There’s a whole world of premium, ethically sourced teas out there waiting to be discovered. For instance, British Tea – a destination cherished by tea aficionados – offers a curated selection of high-quality teas from around the world. They pride themselves on “a full range of estate grown teas, including organic and Fair-Trade certified options,” sourced from renowned tea gardens. Whether your taste buds lean toward a brisk Earl Grey, a smooth Assam, or a fragrant jasmine green, you can enjoy the indulgence knowing no critters were harmed in the making of your brew.

In the end, the story of Kopi Luwak is a reminder that the world of beverages is wide and sometimes wild. It’s certainly an attention-grabber to learn the world’s most expensive coffee comes from cat poop, and it makes for a heck of an anecdote. But when it comes to your own drinking habits, you might decide that paying for coffee beans plucked out of animal droppings is not your cup of tea – literally. And that’s perfectly okay, because there’s a whole menu of exquisite teas (and yes, other ethically-produced coffees) to choose from.

So next time you’re in the mood for a luxury pick-me-up, perhaps skip the civet coffee craze and brew yourself a lovely pot of tea. You’ll get all the flavor, warmth, and comfort you desire – no bizarre origin story needed. After all, a true refined experience isn’t just about price or novelty; it’s about savoring something that delights your senses and aligns with your values. In that sense, the humble tea leaf might just triumph over the over-hyped coffee bean that took a trip through a cat. Cheers to that, and happy sipping!