Kopi luwak is not alone: five animals today serve the same selling point. The Indonesian civet and the Thai elephant digest the cherry; the macaque of India and Taiwan chews it and spits out the bean; the Madagascar bat bites the fruit and leaves it to dry on the tree. Two of these coffees are therefore fermentations by saliva and not coffees of excrement, contrary to what their commercial nicknames suggest.

The Thai Black Ivory, the most expensive in the world, sells for around two thousand dollars a kilo for a reason that is first of all arithmetic: it takes about thirty-three kilos of cherries to obtain one, the rest being ground up or lost during the fifteen to thirty hours of digestion.

Black Ivory Coffee, producer's documentation, taken up by CBS News and NBC News; Sprudge on the Madagascar sector; consistent professional sources on the monkey parchment process

The argument is twofold: the animal would sort the cherries better than a picker paid by weight, and its digestive system would do to the bean what man cannot. The second term is measurable, and it has been measured: Marcone found in 2004 a lower protein content and an altered surface chemistry. But modified does not mean better, and the two published studies do not agree: Jumhawan and his colleagues found in 2013 higher proportions of citric and malic acid in authentic kopi luwak, which they make into authentication markers, whereas several popularizations attribute the opposite finding to Marcone. No published blind tasting settles it to date.

Marcone, Composition and properties of Indonesian palm civet coffee, Food Research International, 2004; Jumhawan et al., Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 61 (2013), discriminating markers

The first term, for its part, collapses on its own. It supposes a free animal, which chooses. A caged animal chooses nothing: it is brought what has been harvested, ripe or not. Farming thus destroys exactly what justified the price. Field investigations describe nocturnal civets held in wire cages, deprived of sleep, and producers who admit labeling beans from captive animals “100% wild,” on the grounds that the animal itself came from the wild.

Since the sorting is invisible in the finished lot, the buyer has no way of verifying what he pays for: that is the definition of an unverifiable promise, and an invitation to the fraud that the specialist press puts, without a published study, at up to 80% of the market.

Investigations by PETA Asia (2020 and 2024), an activist organization, to be cross-checked with the BBC investigation cited above (2013)

Only one of these coffees escapes the reproach, and it must be said. At the Camocim fazenda, in Espírito Santo, the jacu is a wild bird protected in Brazil; the estate, run biodynamically, can neither hunt it nor treat it, and is content to collect what it leaves. No cage, no force-fed animal: a pest turned into a product. The difference comes down to a sentence: the animal that is free to leave is the only one whose sorting still means anything.

Camocim Estate, Pedra Azul; AFP, September 2023; see the landmark 2006 · the jacu in the chronicle

The fermentation vat is the new ground. Co-fermentations add fruits, spices or hops before drying (see the treatment), while infusions add essential oils or flavorings afterward, and the words get confused: according to Hachi Coffee Project, only 3% of the fruit used in co-fermentation ends up in the cup. At the end of 2023, the world barista championship changed its rule: any addition is allowed if it takes place before the green coffee stage.

In June 2024, the Best of Panama disqualified four lots “altered in their natural expression, probably with the intention of scoring better by means of foreign additives,” and the Panamanian association asked for a separate category for altered or infused coffees; the tests used are not published. In the United States, a co-fermented coffee is subject to no particular labeling or allergen obligation: it is green coffee. The mechanism is that of the glazing of 1868, a claim that pays more than the control that would verify it.

perfectdailygrind.com, May 1, 2025; dailycoffeenews.com, June 28, 2024; royalcoffee.com, Kornman, October 23, 2025; LC ch. 17b

What remains is coffee without coffee. Atomo, founded in Seattle in 2019 by Jarret Stopforth and Andy Kleitsch, has sold a cold brew since 2021, then, since 2023, a “beanless” espresso. The recipe assembles date stones, chicory root and grape skins. The caffeine comes from elsewhere: since no bean supplies it, it is recovered from decaffeinated green tea.

Money followed fast. The company has raised about 60 million dollars since 2019, including 7.8 million in January 2025, and Suntory invested in December 2023. Prefer in Singapore, Koppie Bean in Belgium, Minus, Voyage Foods and Compound Foods have come onto the same ground. Only the bases change: sunflower seeds, millet, carob, pea protein, lupin, chickpea, malted barley.

The arguments are those of Postum, turned around. Post sold wheat bran against caffeine and the ills attributed to it. These sell against the climate, the carbon footprint (Atomo claims 93% fewer emissions) and the price. The substitute no longer promises to cure the drinker, it promises to spare the planet.

These products call themselves “beanless coffee.” Are they entitled to be called coffee in Europe? None of the sources consulted says. The 95% threshold of the 2007 Agreement and the 1999 directive close the name to them a priori, since there is not a gram of coffee in them.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomo, accessed September 7, 2026; perfectdailygrind.com, October 8, 2025