Kopi luwak is made from coffee beans plucked from civets’ feces. This is bad news for civets.

In essence, kopi luwak is the type of coffee bean processing which involves small animals called Asian palm civet eating coffee cherries, digesting them and defecating them. Again, you read it properly. The civet cat eats the bean and poops it out. What?s left from that process is then washed, roasted and ground into what people can later drink.

Fetching from $180 to $600 per pound, it claims the title of the world’s most expensive coffee. For instance, a cup of civet cat coffee in the US can go for up to $90. The hefty price tag seems to come from the “specialty” nature of the coffee. Collecting wild civet cat droppings is very time-consuming as it is hard to find and accumulate.

Cat poop coffee, aka Kopi Luwak, are the coffee berries that have once been eaten and excreted by a cat called the Asian Palm Civet. So basically, a cat called the Asian Palm Civet eats the berries from a coffee tree, then basically poops them out. From here, a farmer or coffee harvester would grab the defecated beans and begin processing them.

However, here are some other different types of Animal Poop Coffee: CIVET CAT POOP COFFEE OR KOPI LUWAK. Kopi Luwak is known to be the most expensive coffee in the world. These comes from the feces of Civets cats belonging to the Veverridae Family mainly found in Asia with smaller extent of them found in Southern Europe and Africa.

St Helena Coffee at over $70/pound Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee at over $50/pound Molokai Coffee at over $50/pound Fazenda Santa Ines at over $50/pound Los Planes at over $40/pound Hawaiian Kona Coffee at over $30/pound Black Ivory Coffee Black Ivory Coffee beans are the most expensive beans globally, ranging at $1,100 per pound.

Cat poop coffee is the nickname given to Kopi Luwak, the most expensive coffee in the world made in Indonesia. They have a “special” brewing method that produces what they believe to be the best tasting coffee in the world. This is because cat poop coffee is made from beans that have been eaten and then digested by a civet (yup, pooped out).

Groups like the World Animal Protection organization campaign for retailers to stop the supply of this kind of coffee. It’s hard to say if these campaigns make a noticeable difference as there is currently no way of differentiating a bag of kopi luwak made from a wild civet vs coffee produced from a caged civet.

Despite the occasional grumblings from mainstream media that Millennials are spending more on coffee than on retirement, enjoying your morning cup of coffee is one of the simple, sweet, cheap pleasures in life. Except when it comes to the five most expensive coffee beans on this list, it's not cheap at all.

The answer is because civet coffee is in limited supply. The Asian palm civet. The most superior civet coffee derives from wild civets, but it can be difficult to follow these animals around to collect their droppings. So, to keep up with the demand civet-raising farms have developed.