A new study has found out a way to verify the authenticity of the world's most expensive coffee - Kopi Luwak. The study was led by the Department of Biotechnology in Osaka University, the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute and Bandung Institute of Technology.

Kopi Luwak or Civet Coffee sells for up to $227 per pound and is a target for fraud and scam. It is an exotic coffee from Indonesia and is made from coffee berries which have been digested and excreted by the Asian palm civet.

The study was conducted in an attempt to devise a method to gauge the authenticity of Kopi Luwak. More than being the world's most expensive coffee, it is also the most targeted for fraud.

Researchers made use of extracts from 21 coffee beans of Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora for the study. The coffee beans were gathered from three cultivation areas. Through various analyses, it was found out that citric acid, malic acid and inositol or pyroglutamic acid ration were good discriminant markers to distinguish between original or authentic Kopi Luwak, a 50% Kopi Luwak blend and fake Kopi Luwak or regular coffee.

Specifically, researchers have found out that Kopi Luwak has a certain "metabolic fingerprint" that sets it apart from other types of coffee. According to Eiichiro Fukusaki, one of the researchers involved in the study, Kopi Luwak's metabolic fingerprint reflects higher levels of citric acid and malic acid as well as a certain inositol or pyroglutamic acid ratio, says USA Today.

Although the groundbreaking research has yielded a first measure of its kind which can distinguish authentic Kopi Luwak, other researchers and scientists say that the measure still need a few technical improvements.

"It's the first study of this type, and it's not clear to me that they were really rigorous in terms of sample selection. It would have been useful if they had compared two sets of coffee cherries from the same tree, with one passing through the civet and the other not going through the animal, to see if there was a fingerprint difference between the two treatments," said Stanley Segall from the Institute of Food Technologists.

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