I love these philosophical threads. I've read it with interest, even though I know nothing about roasting, and won't be buying any superstar coffees soon.

In the interest of fairness though, the initial question should have been worded more precisely to have avoided a lot of off-topic discussion:

"Is the price of X coffee proportional to it's Y-value (taste, benefit to the coffee world, whatever)?"

I do look forward to the day when I get to try some of the superstar coffees, prepared as espresso by someone who knows how to do so.

PC

TrlstanC wrote:One things that's true of star coffees that go for high prices in auctions is that whoever wins the auction is the most likely to end up disappointed.

This part of your otherwise excellent post doesn't seem to be true, since more and more people are bidding for the star coffees,and the prices keep going up. The reason is that the buyers are not drinking the coffee themselves, or even selling them by the pound. Instead, they sell them, as star coffees, by the cup. For the right cafes, this is a good business.

Oddly enough the per cup record was not set by an auction coffee, but by Murky's Nekisse (maynbe that's why this year's lot was stolen -- someone in Kuala Lumpur is drinking it a $40 a cup and expecting great things for his sex life )

The comparison to wine comes up in several posts. I think he is speaking to the differences in prep rather than commenting specifically on your post Tom.

Buying a superstar green coffee (short plug - D Pach is still available green from Klatch) is maybe closer to buying a prime rib roast around the holidays. Roll on into Harris Teeter with the VIC card in hand and walk out with a $60 - $70 slab of what could be great meat if it is prepared right. Get a $70 bottle of wine on the way home too since it is a holiday. If you go home and stick the meat in a microwave and pop the cork on the wine, you will get a nice glass of wine while the meat is degraded.

Stick the same meat in a good pan or rack in a good oven with a meat probe while taking a couple good pulls from the bottle while checking the prime rib's progress. You still get a nice tasting wine and a much better than microwaved roast.

Buying the superstar coffee already roasted is like getting great take out food - you can heat it properly and be very pleased, or you can zap it in the microwave and pretty much ruin the flavor. While wine's flavor is affected very minimally by prep (room temp, open, pour, drink, repeat - intentional oversimplification so no 1/2 page posts on how to drink wine, please), prep still has a major impact on the quality with coffee - roasted or not.

I agree with Jim's comment regarding ripe, carefully prepped coffee usually being good. When this level of care becomes more common then special lots will be more common too. This dovetails in with my earlier comment about lesser, 85 - 87 point coffee. This is still by any standard a very drinkable coffee. If it was harvested and prepped more carefully could this hypothetical coffee have been a ninety plus superstar?

another_jim wrote:This part of your otherwise excellent post doesn't seem to be true, since more and more people are bidding for the star coffees,and the prices keep going up. The reason is that the buyers are not drinking the coffee themselves, or even selling them by the pound. Instead, they sell them, as star coffees, by the cup. For the right cafes, this is a good business.

Agreed, I probably should've been clearer that I don't think the people winning these auctions are disappointed - at least not yet, when eventually some auction lot goes for $400 or $500/lb things will be a little dicier. My point was more about auctions in general, and the idea of the Winner's Curse i.e., that whoever ends up paying the most has the highest hurdle to overcome to realize a profit or net benefit. This is especially true with this kind of auction where it's not a unique item, there will be more lots of mostly (or maybe exactly) the same thing being sold in an open market for a price which will undoubtedly end up being lower.

But I think as far as star coffees go we're still in the early days, and would expect prices to keep going up, the people winning these auctions would've likely been willing to pay more than they did. Prices are mostly limited by demand, there's still much more supply, and potential supply from better prep than there is demand. However, if a small percentage of people paying $4/cup for starbucks decide that they'd rather pay $4/cup for truly exceptional coffee that will add a huge amount of demand, and shift the demand curve significantly. When that day comes maybe I'll find myself hunting through "bargain basement" bins of $20/lb coffee. But for now there's still plenty of room for enterprising cafes to buy these coffees and make money selling them brewed, especially when the high prices of auction lots start to bring attention from the "main stream media" and prices haven't gotten so high that I'm feeling priced out of the market.

EricBNC wrote:This dovetails in with my earlier comment about lesser, 85 - 87 point coffee. This is still by any standard a very drinkable coffee. If it was harvested and prepped more carefully could this hypothetical coffee have been a ninety plus superstar?

It depends on the scoring. When cupping for auction juries, Q-contract scoring, SCAA cupping paviolions, etc, scores of 90 and more indicate a coffee that has rare and special tastes. A perfectly ripe and sweet coffee without these will usually score 87 to 89.5. Since "rare and special" is a matter of debate, you'll see the top coffees at many auctions score in the 89 to 91 region, with jurors scratching their heads trying to decide whether the coffees they are really enjoying also represent something special.

The Panama auction is a good example. Is the Geisha flavor "rare and special," or is it now just nice? The top coffees all bracketed the 90 mark, since the Geisha cultivar is becoming common enough for its signature taste to have become generic, albeit at a very high level. In the future, juries will look for something extra if a Geisha is to score over the 90 mark; i.e. it will be treated as a cultivar with high potential, like SL28s, Bourbons, and Ethiopian heirlooms, rather than an automatic superstar coffee.

One factor that limits coffee pricing compared to wine or tea is the volatile nature of the product. Unlike a 1991 crop 400g wheel of excellent raw Pu'er or an excellent bottle of 1991 (sorry, not really into wine, but I like tea) wine, coffee from 1991 - if you can even find some - has not appreciated or even held it's own in value. It is likely fit for worms unfortunately.

Maybe down the road storage for a truly exceptional lot of coffee for more than a season or two will be possible so comparing the 2011 superstar against the 2021 superstar will stir great discussion.

I am entering the realm of anecdotal evidence from here out in this post so take it for what it is worth: A friend of mine who has traveled to Japan for extended periods for a while now and I were discussing the high price of quality aged tea compared to 10 years ago. He chalks it up to a culture thing. He says the Japanese will pay a serious premium to get the best of anything - not paying for hype because most are savvy spenders - but buying quality is the rule rather than the exception according to the information from my conversation.

If he is right about tea, and the concept can be applied to coffee, if a jury says coffee X is the best, then the marketing battle is already won in the Japanese market so inflated pricing is not a negative if it can actually help the product sell through.