PRESS - WINE SPECTATOR - TASTES: WHAT IS COFFEE WORTH?

By Mark Pendergrast
From Wine Spectator magazine, November 15, 2006 issue

I recently received a press release that sounded snobby and hucksterish: "Intelligentsia Roasting Works Offers Up the World's Most Expensive Coffee." It explained that for a limited time I could purchase a half-pound of roasted Panama Hacienda La Esmeralda Geisha beans for a mere $51.95. So I bought some.

I've got to say that despite my initial skepticism, this brew was really something—a Yirgacheffe on Central American acid, so to speak. The taste and silky feel lingered in my mouth long after my last sip. Cupper and coffee consultant Willem Boot, who is planting Geisha seedlings on his own Panamanian property, says the coffee hit him "like a thunderbolt," with its tamarind fruit acidity, mango-papaya sweet flavor notes and lingering perfumy, floral finish.

But is it $100-a-pound good? How much is coffee worth? How much should the average consumer be willing to pay for a cup of coffee? My short answer is that people should pay whatever they are comfortable paying. You can certainly get very good roasted beans for $10 a pound, one-tenth the price I paid for my Panamanian rarity. But I would urge you to expand your mind and your budget when it comes to exploring unusual coffee experiences.

It has always astonished me how cheap U. S. consumers are when it comes to coffee. We seem to think that it is our birthright to drink inexpensive, bottomless cups. Indeed, every time the price of coffee has shot up quickly, Americans have mounted boycott campaigns, politicians have held hearings to investigate the Latin American or Communist plots behind the rise, and coffee roasters have cheapened their blends.

Yet, interestingly, many of the same consumers are willing to pay quite a lot for a fine bottle of wine, understanding that grapes are not just grapes, and that where they grow and what vintners do with them makes a great deal of difference.

The Geisha beans illustrate just how far the coffee industry must go to get anywhere near viniculture in people's perception. There are not that many varieties of arabica coffee bean. They originated in Ethiopia. Typica beans are probably the most direct descendent. Bourbon beans were first discovered on the island of that name (now called Reunion), near Madagascar. Caturra and Maragogype evolved in Brazil. More recent hybrids, such as Catuai, Mundo Novo and Catimor, are more disease-resistant and have higher yields, but they were not bred for taste.

Now, the Geisha beans are taking the specialty coffee world by storm. They come out of Panama, from the farm of grower Price Peterson, but their origin can be traced to Ethiopia. In 1931, the British consulate authorized the collection of ripe cherries of forest coffee (growing wild in the rainforest understory) from a region called Gesha, in southwest Ethiopia, and had them sent to a Kenyan agricultural center. The Amharic name was changed to the more familiar Japanese term. The variety eventually reached Panama in the 1960s.

Until recently, no one thought to harvest and process the Geisha beans separately. Price Peterson credits his son, Daniel, with cupping beans from different areas of their farm in the Boquete region of western Panama and discovering that a small, high valley planted to Geishas produced an extraordinary brew. The entire harvest yielded only 100 bags, and I sampled the intense flavor of those rare beans that morning.

You can brew about 40 cups of strong coffee with a pound of beans. That means that I paid about $2.50 for my extraordinary cup—considerably less than what I would pay for the same volume of anything at Starbucks.

Chicago-based Intelligentsia is one of the cutting-edge, fanatical coffee roasters that scours the world for tiny lots of incredible beans. You will learn more about their philosophies, personalities, adventures and discoveries in future columns.

For the record, however, the Panamanian Geishas are not the world's most expensive coffee beans. That honor goes to Kopi Luwak, rare beans that have been processed through the intestines of an Indonesian civet cat. They cost $160 or more per pound. Perhaps I'll sample some for a future column.

Mark Pendergrast is author of Uncommon Grounds, a history of coffee.

Originally printed in Wine Spectator magazine, November 15, 2006 issue.