Specialty Coffee, Is it worth it?

Specialty coffee can be pretty pricey, it might be interesting to unpack the issue of price and try to uncover what exactly it is that we are buying. To begin lets look at what is probably the cheapest way to consume coffee, brewing commodity grade coffee at home. Even if you buy one of the more sleekly decorated cans of Folgers your only going to be paying somewhere around two dollars and some odd cents per pound for your commodity grade coffee. Though ballooning demand and lagging production is pushing up the futures market for coffee home brewed low grade commodity coffee will remain cheap.

Now specialty grade coffee is a different issue entirely, though the price is tethered to the commodity price, specialty coffee is decidedly more expensive. For instance you cant buy green (unroasted) Kenya's this year for anything under about $6.00 per Lb. That means with the added value of roasting and packaging these fine Kenyan coffee’s your brew at home is going to be more like 10 to 12 dollars per lb. dang! okay now I’m not a numbers guy I’m a flavor aroma guy, but the price of Kenyans are prohibitive even to me, even though for flavor and aroma they are among the tops. I would not however ever waste my money on commodity coffee.

What are we paying for? one thing we’re paying for is the varietal of coffee we’re buying i.e. bourbon arabica. The other thing we’re paying for is preservation. As I've said before one cannot improve a coffee after it’s picked from the tree, rather all one can do is preserve what’s already extant... or ruin it. The extra processing that separates defect and smaller beans from larger more perfect beans is part of the cost. Also the more of the top grade stuff you take out of a crop the lower the value of the remaining coffee, so the specialty coffee drinker also has to compensate for the loss of quality coffee from the commodity crop.

Why should we pay for these things?

Flavor and aroma have value- specialty grade coffee has a much more pronounced flavor, acidity, and aroma than commodity coffee. Larger denser beans that are processed and sorted so as to not contain broken, chipped, or low density beans that would scorch when roasted. This provides us with a clearer flavor and aroma that is un-muddied by roasty smokey flavors. Also we’re paying for sweetness! if you've never enjoyed a good specialty grade coffee then you might not know that coffee is in fact very sweet, each seed has a fairly high sugar content, and through roasting and careful caramelization and development of the beans this sweetness can be maximised.

Knowledge is valuable to some- knowing where a food product is from and in what conditions it was produced becomes virtually impossible in our modern food system. But specialty grade coffee always has a known origin. Some countries like Ethiopia are very hard to track an exact beans origin. But in Latin America specialty grade coffees are coming along with more and more info, from the name’s of the farms all the way to micro lot numbers that cover a specific area on a farm and day of picking and processing. This information is valuable to some as it makes the enjoyment of a fine coffee more specific.

Written by John Cunningham

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