expensive coffee

Now Announcing the $12 Cup of Coffee

Filed under: Dining

New York City's Cafe Grumpy might not take itself all that seriously, but it does take its coffee and its mission – lifting the spirits of undercaffeinated grumps – very seriously. Its home page lists its brews and coffees by name and provenance, and clicking on any of them will provide tasting notes and a more thorough history. You can quickly find out that the Wahana Estate is a Rasuna varietal from Indonesia and the Vintage '97 Immortal Nectar tea is cave-aged with a"sherry fragrance & earthy finish."

If you know your coffee well enough to make sense of all that, then you might want to drop into Cafe Grumpy for its latest serious offering: a $12 cup of java using hand-picked beans from Ethiopia, whose cherries never touch the ground. To answer the question Vincent Vega asked of the $5 shake in Pulp Fiction: no, it doesn't have bourbon in it. The president of the company distributing the beans says it has a "cacophony of nuances," which is apparently code for "apricot, pineapple, bergamot, kiwi and lime," with some chocolate deep down in there and a "super clean" finish.

If the coffee itself doesn't wake you up, then $25 tab for two paper cups of joe should at least raise a morning eyebrow...

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Tags: cafe grumpy, coffee, expensive coffee, new york, new york city

Kopi Luwak, World's Most Expensive Coffee

by Sandy Maple (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Dining

Kopi luwak comes from the Indonesian words for coffee and civet. A civet is a cat-like creature who slinks around eating sweet red coffee cherries in Indonesia. Finicky like a cat, they only eat the best of the harvest, chewing off the exterior and swallowing the hard inner core of the bean. Once digested, the beans emerge in the usual way - amid the animal's dung. The trip through the digestive system has removed the harshness and most of the caffeine and the result is a mellow coffee bean that sells for as much as $600 a pound. Once you separate it from the dung, of course.

One pound of civet droppings will produce less than 5 ounces of beans - and roasting reduces the quantity even more. Only 500 to 1,000 pounds hit the global market each year, which explains the extremely high price of this coffee. Left unanswered, however, is just whose idea it was to pick through civet dung in the first place.

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