"It will be a do-gooder coffee, pooped out by bonafide orphan elephants," Beech explains.
"A CRAPPY CUP OF COFFEE"
According to some experts, a bean that has been partly digested tastes special.
"What I did find with kopi luwak was that the acids, the gastric juices and the enzymes were actually getting inside the bean and breaking down the proteins," says Marcone.
"You start getting amino acids. When these things are heated during roasting, they react with other components and they create certain flavor compounds different from other beans."
So what does the world's most pricey coffee taste like? Coffee buffs say it depends on whether the civet has been eating arabica or robusta beans.
"Initially people thought it must be the best coffee in the world, but I have to be honest about it, it's a crappy cup of coffee," says Beech of the robusta variety.
No matter how exotic the processing, it is mostly robusta cherries the luwak munches. That fact is a legacy of the coffee blight which in 1878 destroyed every low-lying arabica plant from Ceylon to Timor, allowing Brazil and Colombia to take the lead as the world's main suppliers of arabica.
Weeks of phone calls around Indonesia results in a fragrant mailbox containing a brown envelope from an East Java coffee trader. Inside is 250g of brown gold -- kopi luwak arabica.
The aroma is rich and strong and the beans oily. Ground and steeped in boiling water the flavor is, well, much like any other coffee. But the experience lingers in the memory.
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