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FOOD scientist Massimo Marcone was beginning to despair. He had been in Ethiopia for almost two weeks in search of the source of the most exotic beverage on the planet, and he still hadn鈥檛 found a thing. Then, one hot afternoon in the scrubland outside the town of Abdela, one of his scouts made a discovery 鈥� a fresh pile of civet dung. Marcone knelt down, poked around in the dung and found a coffee bean. 鈥淔or me it was an epiphany,鈥� he says.

The find was the culmination of Marcone鈥檚 work on kopi luwak, the rarest and most expensive of all coffees. Kopi luwak is made from coffee beans that have supposedly been eaten and excreted by civets, cat-like creatures that feed on ripe coffee cherries. Marcone had already shown in the lab that kopi luwak beans have a unique chemical profile. Now he had proved that the beans really are eaten and passed by civets.

鈥淭here are people who say kopi luwak is an urban legend,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not. Science has actually proven that it has gone through the gastrointestinal tract of an animal.鈥�

Maybe the sceptics only wish it was a myth. After all, the idea of drinking coffee that has been dug out of animal dung seems unappetising at best. But the coffee is said to have a unique flavour, and so many coffee enthusiasts are anxious to try it that the waiting list stretches for years. With only about 230 kilograms of kopi luwak produced annually, it costs close to $1000 per kilogram 鈥� 10 times as much as the next most expensive coffee varieties.

鈥淭here鈥檚 not a whole lot of it,鈥� says George Guthrie, a coffee trader for Holland Coffee in Sparta, New Jersey. 鈥淚t trades at a very high price. It is very, very sporadic. Sometimes you will get a couple of kilos in, other times you鈥檒l go for months and not see any.鈥�

The story of kopi luwak goes back around 200 years, when Dutch settlers began to establish coffee plantations on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi in what is now Indonesia. The islands are home to the palm civet Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, a tree-dwelling relative of the cat that eats fruit, insects and small animals. Palm civets began feeding on the coffee cherries, swallowing the bean whole in the process. In the spirit of 鈥渨aste not, want not鈥�, plantation workers collected the beans from the civets鈥� droppings. Eventually someone realised that these beans had their own particular flavour, and a new coffee variety was born.

Marcone never intended to become a kopi luwak expert. His main work at the University of Guelph, Ontario, is on endangered plants. His interest didn鈥檛 begin until 2002 when he got a call from a TV producer who told him about kopi luwak and asked him to analyse a sample. 鈥淎t first I thought, this is absurd. I got kind of angry and thought, this is a bad way of wasting somebody鈥檚 time,鈥� he says.

But the producer convinced him the story was for real, and Marcone agreed to his request. The first step was to figure out whether the beans showed any evidence of gastric activity. Sure enough, at 10,000 times magnification, he detected telltale pitting on the bean鈥檚 surface that was not present on the surface of ordinary beans from the same region of Sumatra. This was almost certainly caused by the activity of digestive enzymes.

Surface pitting would not necessarily alter the bean鈥檚 flavour, however, and so Marcone wondered whether the enzymes were also affecting the inside of the bean. Sure enough, tests showed signs of protein breakdown inside the kopi luwak beans that were not there in the control beans. Marcone says this breakdown is probably what gives the beans their flavour.

Many cooked foods taste good because of the Maillard browning reaction, in which amino groups react with sugars to form new flavour compounds. Protein breakdown in the coffee beans promotes this reaction during roasting. 鈥淭he more breaks you have, the more amino groups are exposed and the more Maillard reaction products are going to be formed,鈥� Marcone says. 鈥淪o there should be a difference in aroma and flavour.鈥� The kopi luwak beans also contained less protein overall than the controls, indicating proteins had been leached out of them by the digestive process. Since protein is known to give a bitter taste, this might account for the smooth flavour.

Marcone also believes the trip through the civet鈥檚 intestinal tract could be replicating a coffee preparation method known as wet processing. Rather than simply allowing beans to dry in the sun, in wet processing they are rinsed with water and left to ferment for 12 to 36 hours. Wet-processed coffee generally has a better flavour than sun-dried coffee, and this is thought to be connected to the fermentation process. Marcone says the civet鈥檚 gut seems to act as a natural fermenter. Among other things, it contains lactic acid bacteria, the same kind that make for good wet-processed coffee.

To find out if these differences really affected the flavour, Marcone hired a coffee 鈥渃upper鈥� 鈥� a person trained to detect different flavours in coffee. The cupper conducted a blind test and rated the kopi luwak as distinctly different from a control, with less acidity and less body. Marcone also used an electronic nose 鈥� a machine that 鈥渟niffs鈥� the vapours from a sample and analyses their contents 鈥� which confirmed the cupper鈥檚 conclusions.

In the meantime, Marcone became aware that the kopi luwak supply was drying up, largely because of civil unrest in Sulawesi. He wondered if he might find a substitute in other parts of the world. So last December he went to Ethiopia, the country where coffee originated and also home to the African civet, Civettictis civetta. During his 18-day expedition he gathered some of the beans from civet dung and brought them home for tests. Although the African civet beans varied slightly from the Indonesian beans they showed similar changes, including the pitting and protein breakdown (Food Research International, vol 37, p 901).

So what does it taste like? On a bench in his lab, Marcone roasts a small number of beans, grinds them, and makes coffee. To my naive palate the coffee tastes pleasantly sweet, with no bitterness, but also perhaps a little thin. Educated drinkers describe the taste as syrupy, chocolatey, earthy and musty, with 鈥渏ungle鈥� undertones, whatever they might be. But is it really worth $1000 a kilogram? Probably not.

鈥淗e knelt down, poked around in the dung and found a coffee bean鈥�

And what鈥檚 worse, even if you do cough up, there is no guarantee you are getting the real thing. Kopi luwak鈥檚 flavour can be replicated by clever blending of normal beans, and sometimes is by unscrupulous producers. Marcone has a thriving sideline in testing kopi luwak for buyers (he doesn鈥檛 charge, but does keep the extra coffee for his research). He says about half the coffee he tests is fake.

And that, he thinks, is a shame. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not that people are after that distinct flavour,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey are after the rarity of the coffee.鈥�