Thanks for the article. We’re aware of the controversy. For many years The Coffee Project sold Kopi Luwak from our contact in Indonesia who we trust completely, but the bad press caused us to stop selling. We recently found a source of certified traceable beans and started up again.
After a period of working together with WAP (World Animal Protection Foundation) and UTZ Kapeh to ban “caged” Kopi Luwak, they achieved a great success:
UTZ and Rainforest Alliance won’t certify producers that keep civets in captivity to produce Kopi Luwak.
http://www.worldanimalprotection.us.org/news/sustainable-agriculture-network-san-bans-caged-civets-their-indonesian-farms
These are the people The Coffee Project are working with.
“As NGO, World Animal Protection cannot formally endorse a product, but we have worked with CTB, visited plantations from which they source and the standard they use has been developed with our advice and guidance – we see this as a model of how a standard for kopi luwak should look like. Moreover, UTZ Certified has recently banned the use of caged animals for coffee production within their code, meaning that all UTZ certified suppliers of CTB are now checked under this criteria in order to maintain their certification.”
So We’re confident they are free animals, and now we have documentation should anyone question it. Kopi luwak is a fun silly thing, but definitely all the fun got sucked out of it for a while. Bad news is that Bad Press is hard to overcome. Hopefully people will find the CoffeeProject Kopi Luwak page in the process of doing research for raw kopi luwak Coffee.