Nature magazine reports that food scientist Massimo Marcone has "cracked the secrets" of the world's most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak. The unique characteristics of this strange brew have long been credited to the partial digestion of raw coffee beans by a musk-producing creature native to Indonesia called the palm civet. Marcone duplicated the fabled process by hand-picking beans from the excrement of a related species, the African civet, and carefully analyzed the before-and-after chemical changes. He found that certain proteins were broken down during digestion into smaller molecules which indeed "added to the flavor and aroma of the coffee on roasting."
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Comments
All scientific analysis confirm that Kopi Luwak is not dangerous for health. Dr. Marcone said that as a scientist, he doubted about the safety of a product which has been in contact with excrement but his final tests show that due to the thorough washing process the quantity of pathogen organisms in the beans is insignificant. Whatever the washing process misses the roasting and brewing process will make up for. From: http://www.realkopiluwak.com