Black Gold

INTRODUCTION

In 1991 I bought a small one-kilo bag of coffee, and the press coverage that generated was phenomenal.

‘He’s a pioneer among coffee traders’, the then-young tyro journalist Nigel Slater wrote, moderately enough; ‘The Indiana Jones of the coffee world’, campaigning food writer Joanna Blythman said, upping the ante – I could scarcely complain about that flattering comparison; but then … ‘The Christopher Columbus of coffee …’ I’d had an inkling that introducing the now infamous kopi luwak to the Western world would sprinkle a bit of magic PR dust, but I’d hardly expected to be compared to the leading light of the Golden Age of Exploration.

During my time as the Coffee Director for Taylors of Harrogate in the 1980s and early 90s, most of my suppliers in Europe used to look at me with quizzical amusement when I kept asking them to source me bizarre coffees they’d never heard of. Usually I had to jump on a plane to Yemen or Cuba or wherever to track down my quarry myself. But in the case of kopi luwak …

It happened like this. I’d spent most of 1981 in London serving my coffee taster’s apprenticeship with various City merchants, and I passed some of my spare time researching in the library of the International Coffee Organization. One day I pulled a back copy of National Geographic magazine off the shelf. In it I found a full-length feature about Sumatran coffee, and one paragraph caught my eye – a reference to the author being served a sublime coffee made from beans that had been digested in the stomach of a small weasel-like wild animal called a luwak. These luwaks prowled the plantations at night selecting to eat, in time-honoured fashion, ‘only the finest, ripest coffee cherries’, which were then digested by the animal, evacuated, collected, washed and roasted. I mentally filed this curious tale and forgot about it, until nearly ten years later when I was on the phone with a particularly persistent Swiss coffee trader who was trying as usual to sell me some coffee that I didn’t need. ‘Get me some kopi luwak,’ I said to distract him, ‘I’ll buy that …!’ I explained to him exactly what it was, and where it was to be found: he had been duly amazed and amused, and I had thought no more about it. Three months had passed when he called to announce, ‘Mr Wild! I have a kilo of kopi luwak for you!’

Of all the remarkable coffees I had ever bought, this small bag of kopi luwak generated the most interest by far. The press and public couldn’t get enough of the story. I found out, to my amazement and shock, that what had been once an almost unheard-of delicacy that I had introduced more or less on a whim had become the must-have coffee on the books of many aspiring specialist green coffee trading companies both in Europe and the United States. It had even made an appearance in a Hollywood film; in The Bucket List, a terminally ailing Morgan Freeman brings some for a similarly ailing Jack Nicholson to taste.

As a consequence of all this attention, demand for kopi luwak had soared, and to meet it, wild luwaks were being coaxed onto Sumatran coffee farms to gorge themselves on coffee cherries and produce more crap. An American company had artificially synthesised the flavour imparted by this unorthodox ‘processing’ and licensed a roaster to use it. Far from recoiling in horror, discerning consumers at that time were falling over themselves to taste kopi luwak. A long way from the days when I was the only one willing to drink it, I thought almost fondly, dazzled by the success of my protégé, and wondering idly how this demand was met by the 500 kilos the roasters still proclaimed were collected in the wild each year.

Many other aspects of today’s speciality coffee market amaze me, too. The coffees that I introduced to the startled British public for the first time twenty-five years ago – St Helena Island, Yemeni Mocha Matari, Jamaica Blue Mountain Peaberry, Cuba Crystal Mountain and Harrar Longberry – would now appear really quite run-of-the-mill to the so-called ‘Third Wave’ coffee traders and roasters, focused as they are on individual plantations and plant varietals, along with exceptional husbandry and processing. And they have developed a range of coffee vocabulary far beyond that with which I was apprenticed, to go with their expertise.

But in one respect little has changed since this book was first published: the myths about the history of the coffee trade that are endlessly repeated and recycled by the trade itself are as flawed and derivative as they ever were. When this book was first published in 2003, one of my aims was, as far as possible, to set the historical record straight. The first edition of this book was published in the UK and USA, and translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, Turkish and Vietnamese, so it was hardly an obscure tome. Yet it is still possible to read abject nonsense about the history of coffee on a million coffee trade websites as though its true heritage had never existed. It seems that all the care and attention to detail that is lavished on the other aspects of the coffee trade goes out of the window when it comes to discussing its roots in our past. No one, for example, even seems to have noticed the significance of the find at Kush mentioned in the last chapter.

The book also concerns the economic, environmental and political aspects of the coffee trade. When I was first writing it in 2001/2, world coffee prices were at an all-time low and the human suffering this caused to those working at the most basic level of the trade was immense. Some critics called the approach I took in this book anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, and back then, when economies in the developed world were booming, such an approach was distinctly unfashionable. We live in a very different world to that following the economic crash of 2008, and since then the capitalist model has been under question in a way it has rarely been before. In my pioneering coffee days I was said to be ahead of my time: unfortunately it seems that, with regard this book, my time has finally come, and what I forecasted back then with some foreboding is actually happening now.

So what happened next to my pet rarity cum superstar, kopi luwak? When looking into this coffee and its origins, I quickly came to realise that I had inadvertently created a monster. An article in the Guardian had appeared, exposing, to my horror, the horrendous practice of caging wild luwaks in racks of crude metal cages, where they were force-fed coffee cherries simply to make the prized beans. The journalist claimed that the production of kopi luwak in this intensive, battery fashion was not just confined to Indonesia, but had also been adopted by other South East Asian coffee origins too, such as the Philippines, India, Vietnam and Thailand.

Then out of the blue I received an email from my literary agent. The BBC had come across this book when they were looking for a coffee expert for a programme they were thinking of making, she wrote. What’s the programme about? I replied. Something called kopi luwak, came the reply. Have you heard of it?

So it was that, five months later, in June 2013, I found myself in Medan, Sumatra, in the utterly unfamiliar role of undercover reporter alongside the experienced BBC investigative journalist Guy Lynn, secretly recording interviews with coffee exporters as part of the BBC World Our World investigation into the truth about the kopi luwak trade. I was there in the guise of a director of a (virtual, i.e. non-existent) UK coffee company to provide specialist knowledge of the coffee trade, so that we’d appear to know what we were talking about. After expressing an interest in buying large quantities of genuine wild kopi luwak, we accompanied one trader to Takengon, in Aceh Province, a supposed centre of kopi luwak production. He wanted to demonstrate to us how the coffee he was proposing to sell us was all sourced from wild luwaks living in the virgin forests of the nearby Gayo Highlands. It was a gruelling fifteen hours’ drive from Medan, and when we arrived, we were supposed to go to our hotel to meet up with Chris Rogers, another BBC reporter who would be presenting the finished programme. He had already been there for a few days, secretly filming caged luwaks. As we arrived in the Takengon centre, our driver was flagged down by a man standing in the deserted midnight street. Curiously, he seemed to be expecting us, and after a hasty conversation in Indonesian, we were told that we needed to go to a different hotel to the one we had booked. We went along with the change of plan: the proposed hotel looked OK, and even though Chris was for some unexplained reason still at the original hotel, I was past caring about the whys and wherefores. I collapsed exhausted into bed – only to be woken by a phone call about ten minutes later.

‘Pack your bags and meet me in the lobby!’ Guy’s voice whispered. ‘Our guy has threatened to shoot Chris’s driver. He waved a gun at him!’

He added that I had to destroy the notes that I had made (he’d seen me writing on my iPad non-stop) and I obeyed, grumpily, mourning the tragic loss to travel literature. I was also to give him the recording and camera equipment. This was the same equipment I had been asked to carry all the way from London and smuggle through Medan customs to avoid the attention of the Indonesian authorities who weren’t too keen on unauthorised journalists roaming around their country, apparently. That’s why I had to destroy my notes, incidentally: they were potentially evidence of our nefarious activities.

‘Have we been rumbled?’ I asked Guy five minutes later when I met him in the lobby. He didn’t seem to hear me. He was too busy talking in full-on emergency mode on a satellite phone to some senior producer at the BBC in London. I’d signed all the BBC Health and Safety Compliance forms before we left, but none of them mentioned what the appropriate response to armed threats should be. It was all a far cry from my coffee-buying trips for Taylors, where I’d disappear to far-off lands with nothing more than a cheery wave. I could have been captured by Danakil tribesmen and sold into white slavery – or worse – for all the company knew. Different days.

The long and the short of the matter was that it turned out we’d become enmeshed in some kopi luwak mafia turf war, and far from being rumbled, we had been treated as potentially serious buyers. Chris’s driver’s unexplained presence had been interpreted by our guy as a threat from a commercial rival, and the gun routine was designed to force him to leave the town. In the end it was decided by the faceless voice back in London that we should act as if nothing untoward had taken place, and invent a reason for returning to Medan urgently. So we ended up making a swift exit in our gun-toting trader friend’s 4X4 via a token visit to some entirely spurious wild kopi luwak collecting ‘farm’ which appeared to have been hired for the day as set dressing by our friend, for whom I had by now conceived a distinct loathing.

I finally caught a glimpse of the ravishing, almost Alpine lakeside setting of Takengon as we left to drive the fifteen hours back to Medan. The trader’s choice of a particularly ear-piercing, mind-frazzling, boom-boom Indonesian electro music to play on his CD player seemed designed to add torture to the excitement of the previous night. Even the back of his head (I was seated behind him) assumed a vile aspect. What did I think of kopi luwak at this point? That it was just coffee’s dark history run amok.

The programme was finally screened in September 2013 (you can still watch it on YouTube. WARNING: some of the footage is distressing) and made waves across the kopi luwak as well as the wider coffee trade.

During the months before we left for Indonesia that we spent researching the programme, I’d quickly come to realise that the Guardian report was broadly correct and that the fiction that kopi luwak is a wild-sourced, incredibly rare coffee is maintained even after the coffee arrives in the consuming markets. Some exporters provide certificates of origin to support their claims, but if you examine them closely, they provide no reassurance that the coffee originates from wild animals, only from a certain plantation or district. In turn these certificates can often be used by importing companies to persuade their roaster and retailer clients that they are buying the real deal. I can’t count the number of times I heard the term ‘trusted supplier’ from people in the trade, knowing in some cases that beyond a shadow of doubt the supplier in question was buying coffee from caged luwaks. Retailers, importers, exporters all passed the buck back down the line, but in the actual place where the buck stops, at origin, nine times out of ten I suspected that the coffee was coming from caged luwaks. But even if you visit a plantation, you can’t be sure that what you’re being told is true – just watch the BBC programme and you’ll see that one particular estate I visited producing so-called wild kopi luwak later reluctantly admitted that they had luwaks in cages, although only when faced with incontrovertible evidence from the BBC. There was neither sight nor sound of the luwaks while I was actually there – and I was actively looking for them. That’s the key problem faced by buyers trying to source genuine wild kopi luwak: producers know the process of production is controversial, so they conceal the ugly truth. And the buyers, whether in the know or not, prefer not to look too hard.

Once back in the UK, I timed the launch of my Facebook campaign, which I had titled ‘Kopi Luwak: Cut the Crap’, to coincide with the programme, created to encourage an independent certification for genuine wild kopi luwak. This is the only way it seemed to me that all links in the supply chain could guarantee authenticity, and might eventually lead to a falling off in consumption of kopi luwak.