The world’s most expensive coffee can cost $80 a cup, and scientists now are reporting development of the first way to verify authenticity of this crème de la crème. Photo credit: Purestock/Thinkstock

The world’s most expensive coffee can cost $80 a cup, and scientists now are reporting development of the first way to verify authenticity of this crème de la crème, the beans of which come from the feces of a Southeast Asian animal called a palm civet. Their study appears in the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Eiichiro Fukusaki and colleagues point out that Kopi Luwak (Indonesian for “civet coffee”) is the world’s costliest coffee, often fetching $150-$200 per pound. Palm civets eat coffee berries, digest the soft fruit surrounding the bean and excrete the bean. Workers retrieve the coffee beans and clean, ferment and roast them. The price makes Kopi Luwak a tempting target for fraud, with ordinary coffee sold as Kopi Luwak or real Kopi Luwak adulterated with cheap beans. Fukusaki and his team decided to find a way to scientifically identify the real deal.

They describe identifying unique chemical fingerprints that can be used to identify authentic Kopi Luwak and distinguish pure Kopi Luwak from Kopi Luwak that has been mixed with cheaper coffee. “This is the first report to address the selection and successful validation of discriminant markers for the authentication of Kopi Luwak,” the scientists state.