This Ain't Your Mother's Folgers

By Laura Oppenheimer in Food on Oct 17, 2006 8:26PM

We never thought of coffee as a luxury good. Its always been like toilet paper, or laundry detergent -- something that always needs to be on hand, because if you are out, things can get really bad, really fast.

That is why we were shocked to read that local roaster Intelligentsia recently paid $50/lb for coffee beans in an internet auction, for a grand total of $33,000 for five bags of beans. Granted, this coffee, called Geisha, is special. According to Geoff Watts, director of coffee and green coffee purchaser for Intelligentsia, the Geisha coffee beans have an “Ethiopian character: lemony floral, somewhere between lemongrass and sweet jasmine, and a little citrus,” Watts said. “[The Geisha coffee beans are] incredibly aromatic, crazy, like there was light beaming out of it.”

The beans are selling for $50.25 a half-pound –– a mark-up of 100% -- and even the price doesn’t seem to daunt customers, as almost all of it has already flown off the shelves. With coffee prices like this, it is no wonder people have resorted to cutting costs where they can. If the price for this coffee seems a bit extreme, don't worry; most wholesale coffee still sells for about $2/lb, so the standard $10/lb bag of joe is still making lots of money for retailers and keeping home-brewed coffee affordable for the rest of us.

When we drink coffee at Chicagoist, it tends to be more like something we have to do in the morning in order to act like a normal human being, than the out-of-body transcendent experience described above. But we would take that too if offered to us before the boss gets in to the office.

Coffee beans via Flickr user Nate Steiner.