I think you are using a very narrow definition of "nice beans". At one pound per cup in bean cost, you are doing some coffee equivalent of having a glass from a £500 champagne bottle or listening to music from a pair of £10k speakers. Amazing for sure, but not a reasonable floor for defining "nice".
Normal premium beans are around €15 in a 450g bag over here, and I can't imagine they are all that much more expensive in the UK. If you buy in bulk, they will be a lot cheaper.
Yes at £20 per 350g I am paying slightly more than normal for "nice beans". But most places sell for no less than £10 per 250g of light roast. That's still 76p ($1) per shot.
The only things going for less are darker roasts, supermarket coffee and blends.
Pact isn't ultra high end. Its pretty middle (maybe a bit better) of the road as far as UK roasters go.
Ultra high end would be Gesha or something equivalent. Those often go for fun prices like £28 (and that is still on the low end) for a 150g bag in the UK. That's £3.50 for a 19g shot, and if I was buying Gesha I would probably get a triple precision basket or a step down basket because I would want the absolute best chance of extracting well if I'm spending that much.
My £1.10 shots are definitely above middle of the road. Maybe you can call them high end. But they're not ultra high end and a single shot of ultra high end is definitely a lot more than $.25 as the initial comment in this chain seems to claim.
I just want to chime back in and say that the post I replied to said "nice beans" at £1/cup and the post that was a reply to talked about the cost of beans for a "standard espresso".
My intended angle was to say that I think "nice beans" for a "standard espresso" starts lower than that, for the coffe-appreciating general public.
People like me, who thinks a Starbucks espresso is nothing special but decent enough. Anything better is nice beans! :-)
Coffee from Okinawa would probably be my pick for ultra high end. It sells for about $2 / gram (or 250g for $490). These producers don’t make much coffee each year and it sells out very fast.
I heard of that one, have never tried it. I've always wondered how much of that is just the fact that it's some tiny farm vs actually tasting unique.
I am spoiled for choice, I've modded my machine to be able to do electronically controlled pressure and flow profiles. I wouldn't even have a clue how to dial this in quickly enough to enjoy it (other than relying on Gagné's adaptive profile).
If/when I'm ever in Okinawa I might see if there's a local cafe which has already dialled it in and can brew it for me. I think that's probably the most cost effective way of trying this coffee.
250g bags are only 70% of the size of a 350g bag. Also, they don't seem to offer anything except blends.
Their actual more expensive coffee (which even then, it's unclear if this is a blend or not) is 14 pounds a bag, which... when you scale to 350g comes out to, unsurprisingly, about 20 pounds.
Comment I replied to said 'no less than £10 per 250g' so I don't know why you're dismissing my response of a specialist (if not high end) supplier at as low as £6.95 in that quantity as irrelevant somehow.
The comment you replied to spoke of 10 lbs per 250g for a light roast. I haven't tried Pact personally, but just reading their marketing copy, I don't really have confidence that what they call a 'light roast' is truly a light roast by specialty coffee standards.
For context, a few signs I see:
* The way they even describe the tasting notes don't generally align with coffee selected for light roast suitability. Dark chocolate is rarely a note you see in a light roast.
* Every single bean is described as '<roast level> roast with hints of <tasting note>'.
Also, maybe pricing is better in the UK locally... but their website appears to advertise only their cheapest generic blends at 10pounds/250g. Stepping up to anything else is 11 or 14 pounds per bag.
> Normal premium beans are around €15 in a 450g bag over here, and I can't imagine they are all that much more expensive in the UK. If you buy in bulk, they will be a lot cheaper.
Those are not premium beans, no offense. I agree, bulk pricing will be cheaper than retail, but premium bean pricing is still quite a bit more.
If you want the equivalent of 'having a glass of 500 euro champagne', you need to look appropriately upscale.
They sell a 250g of a natural Gesha coffee for 928 kr - or ~85 euros. That works out to ~6 euros per 18g of coffee if you were to serve this as an espresso. Most of the time, such coffee is used for pour overs, though.
It's worth noting that while that's a fair comparison to the wine bottle, it's not necessarily true to say that either the bottle of wine or the Gesha coffee are inherently higher quality or more premium, they're just rarer or more expensive to produce and somewhat more novel than what a person would get most of the time. You can probably brew equally as satisfying and flavorful coffee by spending significantly less than half that rate, it just won't be as fancy feeling.
As someone who drinks quite a few of these incredibly weird coffees: I don’t agree. You can get some of the way there, but there are flavors and experiences that you won’t recreate with cheaper coffee.
There just is no way to get as clear of flavor separation and striking flavors as you can get with some highly specialized coffee. Gesha coffee is well known, but you can also spend a lot on expensive processing techniques such as fermented coffees.
As an example, there was a coffee I had for a period of time that tasted like cherries. Not just “hint of cherry”, I had multiple people tell me this coffee tasted like candy. Not coffee flavored cherry, just cherry. I’m currently drinking a coffee right now that tastes like red wine.
Can you get a lot of the way there? Absolutely. A nice Ethiopian coffee naturally processed can be half or a third of the price of a Gesha and still have lots of fruity flavors.
It’s true that some expensive coffee doesn’t live up to the hype much like expensive wine, but it’s unfair to say that the only thing expensive coffee is buying you is uniqueness.
> but it’s unfair to say that the only thing expensive coffee is buying you is uniqueness
I don't mean to be intentionally obtuse, but it does seem like you just described that what you get primarily is uniqueness or degrees of uniqueness.
What I was intending to say is that you can absolutely get within a negligible margin for far less than half the price of say, 85 euro per 250g, which is comically expensive, all equipment and other ingredients kept more or less the same in terms of investment. Not all fermented coffees run that high either, and a lot of the cost comes from rarer varietals that may or may not be unique, but just aren't inherently higher quality than high specialty grades of others. For example https://www.prototypecoffee.ca/shop/oxaofizuq8la2g7m9ercvtxv...
That's not to say they aren't worthwhile or in-appropriately priced novel occasional experiences, but in a similar fashion to what you said, there are various high-grade less expensive beans to be had from Ethiopia, Indonesia, Colombia, etc.. that can distinctly taste like watermelon, starburst, blueberry, cherry; they're still very expensive relative to even quite good blends from a local roaster, but they're not that high. Incidentally, if I wanted just cherry, actual cherries at their already high price would be wildly less expensive, but that's besides the point. Ultimately they're still subject to variation in brew consistency, palate, etc.. to the point that I'd prefer to get on average 98% of the way to the same cup with 1/2 the spend considering how likely it is that some of it won't turn out that great anyway, especially without a multi-thousand dollar grinder or custom recipe water.
The exception to my comments may depend on market too, I don't know how expensive some of the extremely fruity Indonesian beans may be in EU for example, or how much a Pink Bourbon might be in Aus.
For all of the best specialty coffee I've had, there's been at least one cup at the same price-point, same roaster, same cafe, that just wasn't anything amazing, and it's a silly amount of money to chase an occasional unique novelty as a regular thing imo. I'd rather have very good most of the time for much less than half as much.
> What I was intending to say is that you can absolutely get within a negligible margin for far less than half the price of say, 85 euro per 250g, which is comically expensive, all equipment and other ingredients kept more or less the same in terms of investment. Not all fermented coffees run that high either, and a lot of the cost comes from rarer varietals that may or may not be unique, but just aren't inherently higher quality than high specialty grades of others.
Fully agree. There's plenty of good coffee you can have that isn't stratopherically priced. That said, there's a certain price bracket where you just cannot get some of these flavors. Anyone buying $10/lb coffee will never get those flavors. If you want lightly roasted coffee with fruity or floral flavors, you have to spend a certain amount.
I'm not suggesting you have to spend the "$500 champagne" equivalent to get good coffee; I'm just saying that coffee isn't a percentage goodness thing. For certain types of coffee flavors, there isn't any way around spending money to get them. Certain flavors are a lot easier to achieve with lower cost coffee, though. Any sort of chocolate or nutty flavor is generally easier to achieve with cheaper coffee, so if that's what you like drinking... then you probably don't need to spend as much.
Keeping it in a local context: Lidl sells coffe beans for 200kr/kg. That is pretty cheap coffe and they probably have very high margins on it.
Zoegas fairtrade beans are perhaps twice that price. That is premium coffe. (like Barilla is a premium pasta, Galbani makes premium mozarella, Alfa Romeo makes premium cars, Rotari prosecco is a premium sparkling wine).
If you go far beyond that, you are in high end territory. (Ferrari vs Alfa Romeo, champagne over prosecco). There is no limit to what you can spend to get the most unique flavour experiences.
And trying it back to the very root of this thread. A random, generic café that charges 8$ for a single shot espresso, does not need to do that because the cost of beans is killing them. The cost of beans is essentially nothing, unless you are a one-in-a-thousand speciality coffe house.
> If you go far beyond that, you are in high end territory. (Ferrari vs Alfa Romeo, champagne over prosecco). There is no limit to what you can spend to get the most unique flavour experiences.
I really don't agree with that. $20/kg of coffee is quite cheap, at least in the US. Maybe Sweden has wildly cheaper coffee prices, but I doubt that.
$20/kg equates to roughly $6.80 per 12oz, which is below the bottom end of coffee prices you can find in a store if you're buying 12oz bags.
A normal 'specialty' coffee costs at least $14/12oz (or, ~$40/kg). That coffee is nothing particularly extraordinary. In car analogies, that would be the equivalent of a low-end Lexus or Mercedes.
> Stepping to twice the price of the low-cost beans is my definition of premium. Like going from a 30k Fiat to a 60k Alfa Romeo.
Your definition of premium isn’t based in reality, though. It’s more equivalent to going from a $5000 motorcycle to a $10000 used car, to continue straining the car analogy.
If the $86/bag coffee is the equivalent of a Ferrari, then scaling down by the same amount would be your $60k car. Which would be like paying $14/bag (for 12 oz of coffee).
Where are you getting good coffee that cheap? You're pulling shots out of 7.5g of coffee?
I am buying some nice beans here in the UK and my espresso coffee cost has now reached £1.10 per.
I'm doing relatively standard 19g shots.