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span class="inline inline-center">Pricey: PT Solutco’s kopi luwak retails for US$100 a kilogram.For gourmet coffee connoisseurs worldwide, the highest of high-end coffee beans come from the hindmost low-end of a civet cat.

Start with the famed Arabica beans of Sulawesi’s Toraja Valley, then pass them (for flavor-enhancement) through the gut of that civet or luwak. The resulting kopi luwak, at US$100 per kilogram, is the world’s priciest coffee, costlier than caviar.

It took a visionary Dutch trader-turned-grower, Captain H.J. Stock Van Dyke, to realize Tana Toraja’s potential as a coffee region.

Perched 1,400 meters above sea-level, the prime plantation site isn’t much to look at by day. Pine trees outnumber paddy fields, houses are scarce, the air is thin and the harsh midday sun makes you squint. But, at nightfall, thick mist coats the hillside in cool dew – ideal conditions for Arabica.

Van Dyke laid in a cobblestone road, built himself a whitewashed square Dutch-style house and planted 50 hectares of bushes. Within a decade, his coffee, and other Torajan plantations, had already earned a following. Even today, coffee-geek websites wax eloquent about the “true masterpieces” from this region, “the ripe black cherry flavor”, “clove-like fragrances” or “honey finishes.”

But before Van Dyke could reap the full fruits of his investment, he found himself interned as a prisoner of war by the invading Japanese. He never resumed his Toraja operation, and for decades after World War II the plantation laid fallow in the government land-bank of the newly independent Republic of Indonesia. Coffee lovers worldwide mourned Toraja Arabica as a “lost coffee”.

Lost, that is, until the 1980s, when PT Sulotco, a subsidiary of the Kapal Api Coffee group that includes Excelso, leased the plantation grounds. The new renters relaid the road and housed on-site management in Van Dyke’s grand Dutch mansion. They went on to expand the operation and reinvigorate it as a source of high-end coffee exports to Japan, Germany and Australia.

Some aspects of the original operation Kapal Api wisely left untouched. Much of PT Sulotco’s Torajan coffee processing remains antiquated. Instead of adopting the sterile assembly lines of modern industry, PT Solutco still treats its freshly harvested coffee berries in open ceramic vats. Fresh water cleans the beans before a metal pulping machine strips them of their skin. Then the beans are left to ferment in another set of open vats.

“This is the most important stage for the quality of aroma and taste in the final roast,” says Samuel Karundeng, PT Sulotco’s lead on-site manager. After 16 hours, the beans are washed again and laid out to dry under plastic canopies. Then, after another week of drying in the sun, the beans (now blanched white) are transferred to a cool storage area, where they are hulled and hand-sorted by legions of Torajan ladies.

If PT Solutco’s processing methods seem distinctly retro, so is its choice of inputs, at least since 2002, when the company decided to go 100 percent organic. The decision seems counter-intuitive, given the scale of the company’s operations and the prevailing agricultural practices of Sulawesi, where almost every paddy field is dosed with chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Yet Karundeng reasons that, at Rp 3,000 to 5,000 (US 3.3 cents-US 55 cents) a kilogram, chemical fertilizer would be prohibitively expensive for an operation of his size. Instead Solutco opted to buy bulk fertilizer from Rantepao, three hours away, locally produced from manure gathered at the sacrificial poultry market.

And besides, organic provenance is an extra selling point for the up-market consumers that PT Solutco hopes to reach. The Indonesian government does not have an organic coffee certification program yet, but many of the local coffee producers, through their trade associations, benefit from the brand-equity of a “specialty” designation from the specific region of Toraja.

And if that’s not enough to entice the world’s most discerning palates, what could be more “organic” than passing your coffee through the gut of a cat? In 2009, PT Solutco set up its kopi luwak operation with a cadre of civet cats, all housed in a luxury long house that’s split into caged enclosures. Each cell holds a table with a small shed roughly shaped into a tongkonan or traditional Torajan house with a roof that splays out like bullhorns.

Considering the amount of value they add (raising the price of Arabica beans 14-fold, from $8/kg to $100/kg retail), no wonder the animals are pampered. Every day they are fed a diet of Javanese honey, snails, banana, papaya, eels, cereal, Yakult energy drinks and – of course – coffee berries. Twice a month, they’re offered a bowl of Pocari Sweat to balance their electrolytes.

No sooner do the coffee berries complete their 12-hour journey through the luwak gut than the PT Sulotco workers hurry to clear the cells. On our short tour, we only spotted one coffee-laden luwak turd; the place smelled amazingly clean for a 200-inmate cat house.

Not that the civets necessarily appreciate all these attentions. Native to Java in the hills around Bandung, they sometimes find the Sulawesi climate disagreeably hot. When that happens, they’ve been known to rip the Torajan roof ornaments right off their tongkonan sheds, according to luwak caretaker Petrus Pakonliang.

He pauses in front of a cage neatly labeled “Petrus”, whose inmate, he informs us, “was named after me, because — like me — he’s small but eats a lot.” His civet cat namesake looks up from his feeding bowl to throw Petrus a bilious look, then goes back to his snack of snails.

—Photos by Melati Kaye