Trung Nguyên Lê Tourism Company JSC, Trung Nguyên Franchising Company JSC and Coffee Hypermarket. Its chairman and CEO is Dang Le Nguyen Vu (in Vietnamese: Đặng Lê Nguyên Vũ), who is known as Vietnam's Coffee King. Trung Nguyên is known as an important producer and distributor of kopi luwak (Vietnamese: cà phê chồn), weasel coffee Trung Nguyen, also known as civet coffee, both natural and simulated. Kopi luwak, widely noted as the most expensive coffee in the world, is coffee made from the beans of coffee berries which have been eaten by the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) and other related civets,
Kopi Luwak "Washington Post" reviewed kopi luwak available to US consumers and concluded "It tasted just like...Folgers. Stale. Lifeless. Petrified dinosaur droppings steeped in bathtub water. I couldn't finish it." Some critics claim more generally that kopi luwak is simply bad coffee, purchased for novelty rather than taste. Massimo Marcone, who performed extensive chemical tests on the beans, was unable to conclude if anything about their properties made them superior for purposes of making coffee. He employed several professional coffee tasters (called "cuppers") in a blind taste test. While the cuppers were able to distinguish the kopi luwak as distinct from the