Kopi Luwak pound in 2010. The specialty Vietnamese "weasel coffee", which is made by collecting coffee beans eaten by wild civets, is sold at US$500 per kilogram. Most customers are Asian, especially those originating from Japan, China and South Korea. Sources vary widely as to annual worldwide production. The price of farmed (considered low-grade by connoisseurs) kopi luwak in large Indonesian supermarkets is from US$100 per kilogram (five times the price of a high quality local arabica coffee). The price paid to collectors in the Philippines is closer to US$20 per kilogram. Some specialty coffee shops sell cups of brewed kopi luwak
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