Our whole bean coffees cost between 15 and 20 euro for a 250 g bag, and that bag makes sixteen filter cups. One euro a cup for the Nicaragua Kilembé, ninety-four cents for the Brazil Arara, one euro twenty-five for the Colombian Pink Bourbon microlot, the dearest 250 g bag we sell. On espresso the figure drops further, because the dose is smaller.
The price that frightens you is the price of the bag, and it has every right to frighten you while it stays a single number hanging off nothing. Twelve euro buys a kilo at the supermarket, the comparison takes two seconds, and on that comparison industrial coffee wins every time.
We sell this coffee, so read us with a hand on your wallet. Which is why two things nobody usually writes down are here as well: the part of the price we cannot give you numbers on, because we have not verified them, and the cases where an expensive bag is not worth what it asks.
What a cup costs, rather than a bag
The sum is short and you can do it again yourself. A filter cup wants about 15 g of coffee, so a 250 g bag gives you sixteen full cups. The Nicaragua Kilembé costs 16 euro, which comes to one euro a cup, round. The Brazil Arara and the Golden Huila are 15 euro, so ninety-four cents. The Colombia La Primavera, a Pink Bourbon microlot, costs 20 euro and lands at one euro twenty-five.
Against the cup you buy on your way to work
Whatever a flat white costs on your street, and you know that number far better than we do, it buys one cup, drunk once, from a coffee whose roast date you will never see. The euro version happens in your own kitchen, from beans with a date printed on them, and it happens again tomorrow morning out of the same bag. That is the comparison worth making, and it is the one the price of the bag hides from you.
On espresso at home the number moves again. With the 17 g double basket that comes with any serious machine, a 250 g bag of Genoa at 16 euro gives fourteen extractions, a little over a euro each, and every extraction fills two of the small Italian cups: the double shot split in two is how a bar in Italy serves two customers at once. That works out at fifty-seven cents a coffee, ground at the moment, roasted by us, with the date on the bag.
The bag is the figure you look at, the cup is the figure you actually spend. It is the same mental step you take with a bottle of wine, which nobody judges by the litre.
What you are paying for, step by step
The first step is the picking. On a specialty lot the pickers go over the same tree several times to take only the ripe cherries, and every pass is another day of work on a small parcel. On our Colombia La Primavera that repeated picking is the whole reason a family can keep its own parcel separate instead of watching it disappear inside a large lot.
The second is processing, and it is never free. A washed coffee needs water, tanks and control over the fermentation. A honey like our Costa Rica Tres Milagros keeps 60 per cent of the mucilage on the bean and stays on raised beds for twenty or twenty-two days, turned by hand: three weeks in which that coffee takes up space, time and attention, and in which the wrong rain can ruin everything.
The third is the journey, and here we have an example of our own that is worth more than any argument. The green from Gran Canaria arrives carried by hand, with no importer in between, because those farms produce quantities so small that no normal supply chain would look at them twice. How that relationship started is told in how we found the coffee of Gran Canaria, and it is the concrete proof of what a short chain means once it stops being a word on a label.
The fourth step is roasting, and it is the only one where we can give you measured numbers, because we are the ones measuring them. We roast in Albenga on a 6 kg Giesen, in an open roastery area in full view of the room, in batches of two to five kilos at a time. A small batch means a curve built for that coffee and no average to hold to, and it also means something almost nobody takes into account: coffee loses weight in the roaster. Across our sessions the weighed loss sits between fourteen and fifteen per cent, so ten kilos of green come out as a little over eight and a half kilos roasted. That missing kilo and a half was paid for at the start.
The fifth is the packing, with the roast date printed on it, which is a commitment more than a cost: it forces us to work in small, frequent batches instead of producing once and selling for a year.
The part of the price we cannot give you numbers on
Here we owe you an uncomfortable answer. The right question, when the price of coffee comes up, is how much of it actually reaches the farmer, and percentages and comparisons that look precise circulate everywhere, in English with particular confidence. We have not verified those numbers for our own chain, so we do not print them. Writing a percentage that sounds good would be the easiest thing in this article, and also the quickest way to deserve being disbelieved about all the rest.
What we can give you is the mechanism, and it is already enough. The more steps there are between the person who grows the coffee and the person who roasts it, the more the price you pay gets divided among people who never touched it. Buying from a family, from a farm, or from a small importer who declares the lot costs more per kilo and leaves more value at the beginning of the chain. On the Gran Canaria green we shortened that chain to a single step, and it is the case where a short supply chain can be looked at instead of described.
Why a kilo costs less than four 250 g bags
In our shop the kilo format runs from the 50 euro of the Arara to the 70 of the Colombia La Primavera. The Kilembé costs 52 euro a kilo against the 64 you would spend on four 250 g bags: twelve euro of difference, close to twenty per cent. Depending on the coffee the saving sits between twelve and twenty-five per cent, and nearly all of it comes from packing and labour, because filling and sealing four bags costs four times filling one.
The kilo has an honest drawback, though, and it is better said now than later. If you drink two coffees a day, a kilo lasts you months, and through those months the coffee goes on losing aroma even when it is properly sealed. The kilo suits people who drink a lot, households with several coffee drinkers, or anyone who has learned to handle storage as it should be handled: the real windows and the four enemies of coffee are in the guide to storing coffee. For everybody else, two 250 g bags bought a month apart beat one kilo bought today.
When an expensive bag is not worth what it asks
Now the part that costs us. A dearer coffee is not automatically a better coffee, and the price of certain lots carries rarity, packaging, storytelling and whichever variety was fashionable that year. Those things can make sense, and every so often they are missing from the cup. The measure stays the same: what you taste while you are drinking it, rather than how hard it was to find.
It applies to us as well, and here is the sum on the most expensive coffee we sell by weight. The Gran Canaria Alt Zero costs 19 euro for 125 g, which is barely eight cups: almost two euro forty each, more than double one of our ordinary single origins. That price describes a tiny production on the only island in Europe where coffee grows, a coffee grown at sea level that gives pear, winter apple and citrus in the cup, and green we carry back ourselves. If what you want is a good coffee for every day, your place is at the other end of the list, on the 15 and 16 euro bags, and we take no offence whatsoever.
There is the opposite case too, and it is the more frequent one. If your kitchen has no grinder, moving up in price on the bag is the worst way to spend that money: the same amount put into a grinder changes far more of what you drink, and how that works is in the complete guide to extraction.
Questions and answers
Why is specialty coffee so expensive?
Because it pays for selective hand picking, for processing followed lot by lot, for a chain with few steps, and for roasting in small batches with the date printed on the bag. Coffee also loses between fourteen and fifteen per cent of its weight in the roaster, and that loss was paid for at the start. What changes in concrete terms is in specialty and supermarket coffee, what actually changes.
How much does a cup of specialty coffee cost?
At our prices, between ninety-four cents and one euro twenty-five for a 15 g filter cup, and around fifty-seven cents for an espresso pulled from a 17 g double basket.
Is the one kilo bag worth buying?
It is worth it if you get through it in a few weeks: the saving runs from twelve to twenty-five per cent depending on the coffee. If you drink two coffees a day a kilo lasts months, and over those months you lose in aroma what you gained on the price.
Does a more expensive coffee taste better?
Not always. In some lots the rarity and the tiny volume weigh more than the cup does, and that includes our own Gran Canaria. The measure stays what you taste while drinking it, which is why we print origin, process and tasting notes on every coffee.
The price of a bag is the only piece of information you can compare while knowing nothing at all, and it is also the least useful of them. Divided by the cups it holds it turns into a small figure; looked at for what it pays for, it turns into a chain of people and gestures you can check one by one. We roast in front of whoever walks in for exactly that reason: the price is open to argument, the verifiability is not.
Our single origins, with prices and formats in plain sight: do the sum by the cup, then decide. They ship anywhere in the European Union.