Herveys Range Heritage Tea Rooms Herveys Range Heritage Tea Rooms The Herveys Range Heritage Tea Rooms are an historical cafe located at the top of the Hervey Range, approximately north-west of Townsville in North Queensland, Australia. The tea rooms are famous for being the only cafe in Queensland to include Kopi Luwak coffee on their menu, hailed as the most expensive coffee in the world. Kopi Luwak is an Indonesian coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of the Asian palm civet ("Paradoxurus hermaphroditus"), known in Indonesia as the luwak. Collected from the floor of the jungle, the defecated beans are
Kopi Luwak are eaten by a civet for their fruit pulp. After spending about a day and a half in the civet's digestive tract the beans are then defecated in clumps, having kept their shape and still covered with some of the fleshy berry's inner layers. Despite being in contact with faeces and pathogenic organisms, the beans contain negligible amounts of the enteric (pathogenic) organisms associated with feces. Moreover, the "cherry" or endocarp surrounding the bean is not completely digested by the luwak, and after being collected, the farmer performs thorough washing and removes the endocarp. The final roasting of the beans