gold bullion: easier to find, cheaper to brew
January 18, 2006 – 12:21 ameveryone seems so agog at the notion of aussies and canadians collectively paying $49.75 a pound for brazil’s finest green coffee. but haven’t prices far exceeded this before, and for a product far more, uh, exotic?
p.s. this story even got a pick-up from mainstream media outlets! and still the so-called third-wave gurus act like it’s groundbreaking or something!
UPDATE: this blog has now clearly appended facetious-jibe-indicating exclamation marks to the above post. obviously, the auction price amounts to exciting news for proponents of the cup of excellence program, the new clover experience, under-subsidized coffee farmers, just plain-amazing brazilian coffees, etc., and in no way is comparable to the pooped-coffee product so long flogged by the same people who profess undying devotion to the finer culinary elements of goat pancreas. that point has been quite well made elsewhere in the echo chambers of third-wave coffee geekery, and we provided links. this blog’s only point was: blarg. forgive the snark.
The point is just the price. Kopi Luwak is novelty coffee (much like Jamaican Blue Mountain). Kopi Luwak is not particularly nice to drink, it is often just robusta sold under false pretences (again like JBM about twice as much is sold as is produced. Subtle).
Santa Ines is the highest scoring Cup of Excellence coffee to date. It is the best tasting coffee these judges have found in several years in several countries. Amateurs can pick it out of a table full of the other CoE winners.
Yes the price is incredibly high, but it is a statement from not only the buyers but on behalf of a program that seeks to reward true quality with price (unlike Fair Trade say, which awards higher prices indiscriminately as far as I can see. It certainly ain’t quality.)
It is obviously tied into a lot more – the Clover launching provides a platform to bring this coffee to people, and already people are coming into Artigiano asking when they will be able to try it (not for another couple of months).
It won’t happen again for a long time (this kind of price war – again knowing who was bidding behind the scenes explains the price a little more). I just hope it is used to bring Cup of Excellence a little closer to the mainstream.
James
you are most correct, jim. and i, personally, would die to get my bouche on a cup of it.
this post was more than a little facetious, and i frequently produce little more than snark when topics have already been throughly parsed elsewhere. i, with my credit card, regularly support the CoE, and like what this means for the farmers.
Sorry if I came across grumpy there – I just really hope this event does good for the CoE. I am quite worried about how little it has been reported in the global press.
I know us third wavers (I am coming to dislike this term almost as much as the bile inducing Rockstar Barista – if they could just climb down from their ego for a moment…) are a bunch of flowery, overexcitable pretentious coffee snobs (well, I am anyway!), but I do think underneath all that this could be something that has an important and lasting effect on our industry.
agreed. and you spur a fascinating thought:
i sometimes wonder if the scant press attention (c.f CoE auction) doesn’t have something to do with the fact that third-wavers have become so pretentious. it’s a common dilemma: how to create low barriers of entry, so that a movement grows, while creating a strong enough identity (membership benefits, basically) to retain those who are at or near the movement’s apex.
basically, i fear that the insidery/elitist/clickish nature of those at the center of the ‘third wave’ is doing the opposite of what we truly want — discouraging the rapid spread of the coffee gospel.
i say this, of course, as a hopeless snob myself whose vocabulary and blog content frequently befuddles those who are interested but clueless.
still, everything from the recent accounting scandal at the scaa to my own online experiences of approaching a new subject only to get smacked down by some guru seem to indicate the heights many of us have reached aren’t spreading as well as one would hope. hmmmm.