Date: 20 Jul 2006 14:01:30
From:
Subject: Forbes Mag. Big Article On Specialty Coffee
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http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/19/priciest-coffee-beans_cx_hl_0720featA_ls_print.html
Wine & Food Feature
Most Expensive Coffee
Hyon Jung Lee 07.20.06, 12:30 AM ET
The most expensive cup of joe, in the minds of many coffee drinkers,
is a $4 coffee at Starbucks. Perhaps a half-caf soy almond latte
prepared by a favorite barista.
But for serious coffee connoisseurs, people who are looking for a
world-class drink rather than a "gourmet" cup, the top fare is made
from the highest-quality beans in the world. The beans come from very
specific regions and are prized for their unique characteristics.
Cultivated on small farms, they are coddled by farmers who care more
about quality than quantity.
You wouldn't dare add milk or sugar to coffee of this caliber--it
would compete with the beans' natural sweetness, and distinct flavors
and aromas.
Taste ten of the most expensive coffees in the world.
Such top-quality coffees are rare--and prices for them are accordingly
high. Superior beans command retail prices of over $100 per pound in
what the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a Long Beach,
Calif.-based trade association, describes as a $11 billion-plus
specialty coffee market.
We have searched the specialty coffee market for the priciest coffee
in the world--not the most expensive cups of coffee, which can vary by
a matter of cents--but the priciest specialty beans.
They include such products as Hacienda la Esmeralda Geisha from
Panama, which made news at the end of May when it set an auction
record of $50.25 per pound. Praised for its fruit and floral flavors,
it retails for more than $100 per pound. There are also novelty
coffees, whose prices are influenced not just by quality, but by the
romance or uniqueness of their origins.
St. Helena coffee, for instance, is a high-quality coffee grown on the
remote South Atlantic island to which Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled in
1815. Then there's the Indonesian Kopi Luwak, a coffee that is only
roasted after it's been eaten and excreted by a palm civet.
The U.S. coffee market looks very different today than it did a
half-century ago. From the 1950s to the 1990s, a few small roasters
managed to obtain high-quality beans for select markets like New
York's Little Italy or Berkeley, Calif. But most coffee was sold in
cans, and consumers were more concerned with price and consistency
than taste.
In 1962, the U.S. reached a peak in per capita coffee consumption: The
average person was drinking more than three cups of murky brown swill
per day. Despite the proliferation of Starbucks , which was founded in
1971, today the average American drinks less than two cups of coffee
per day. That coffee is significantly tastier, however.
Coffee evangelists have long sought to elevate coffee above commodity
status. For years, great coffees were blended away, used to make
fairly uniform-tasting brews. Little recognition was given to the
individual farmer, and the unique flavor profiles of different
varieties of coffees, or coffees from different micro-climates, were
ignored.
With the specialty coffee boom of the '90s, great beans are now making
a more direct journey from crop to cup. Specialty roasters and
retailers buy beans directly from the farmers, paying premiums that
encourage them to improve growing methods and produce superior beans.
The beans are transported and carefully roasted before being sold to
consumers. "While you cannot make a mediocre coffee good during the
roasting process, you can ruin a great coffee during roasting," said
Mike Ferguson of SCAA.
George Howell, founder of the George Howell Coffee Company and its
Terroir Coffee brand based in Acton, Mass., emphasizes that coffee is
a "noble beverage," worthy of the same respect as fine wine. A 30-year
veteran of the coffee industry, he has pushed to decommoditize coffee.
After creating models of economic sustainability for coffee farmers
for both the United Nations and the International Coffee Organization,
Howell co-founded the Cup Of Excellence program, among the most
esteemed award programs for coffees. The strict competition selects
the best coffee produced in a country for a particular year. The
winners are auctioned off online.
Many of the most expensive coffees in the world are Cup of Excellence
winners. In compiling our rankings, we examined auction prices for
green (unroasted) beans and spoke to roasters and trade organizations
around the country. Only single origin coffees were considered, which
means that the beans come from one place. Blends were not considered,
because they can contain inferior beans from unidentified sources.
In general, we ranked the coffees by retail price. One exception is El
Injerto from the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala, which is not yet
available but is expected to retail at more than $50 per pound. The
second is Fazenda Santa Ines from Brazil, which has already been
bought up and is only available by the cup; we ranked it by its
auction price of nearly $50 per pound. We rounded all figures to the
nearest dollar.
As expensive as these coffees are, when compared with wine, the best
coffee beans are a relative bargain.
"If you pay $10 per pound for the coffee you brew at home, a cup of
coffee costs less than a Coke from a 12-pack," Howell points out. Even
if you pay twice as much for a pound of beans, an entire pot of coffee
will still cost less than a glass of wine from a $10 bottle.
So even at these prices, feel free to drink up.
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