Point Pleasant Brewery Bans Civet Coffee Beer After PETA Push

Frye Brewing Company Stops Using Kopi Luwak After Exposé Shows Civet Cats Are Kept in Filthy Cages

For Immediate Release:
December 31, 2020

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

A box of delicious vegan chocolates is on the way from PETA to Frye Brewing Company in thanks for its quick decision to stop selling beer made with kopi luwak—a type of coffee sourced from the excrement of caged Asian palm civet cats—after hearing from PETA.

Owner Mike Frye told PETA that his kopi luwak beer supplier claimed that the coffee beans are collected harmlessly from civet cats living free in the forest. After watching a recent PETA Asia video exposé revealing that these animals are actually kept inside small, waste-filled cages and fed a diet high in coffee berries, he said, “[W]e agree there is no reason to perpetuate an industry where any animals are harmed or mistreated,” and stopped selling the beer.

“No pint of beer or cup of coffee is worth trapping a sensitive animal in a filthy cage and depriving them of a life,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA urges everyone to follow Frye Brewing Company’s compassionate example, see through kopi luwak’s producers’ lies, and refuse to buy a single bean of this cruelly obtained coffee.”

PETA Asia’s investigation revealed that it isn’t feasible to collect the excrement in the animals’ natural habitat. One producer said that farmers who collect from the jungle can only make up to 20 kilograms of kopi luwak a year.

The kopi luwak industry also presents a pandemic risk: Caging animals amid their own waste—which subjects them to stress and suppresses their immune system—creates a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases. SARS jumped from civet cats to humans, and it’s thought that they may also have been an intermediary vector for the novel coronavirus. Civet cats who are no longer useful to the kopi luwak industry are sometimes sold to markets with unsanitary conditions and put alongside animals of other species—creating breeding grounds for new diseases.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.