Moko Coffee

The Worlds Most Expensive Coffee

Hacienda la Esmeralda's famed Geisha coffee sold at the Best of Panama 2007 auction last Spring for an astonishing $130 per pound, making it the most expensive coffee in the world. On October 1, our roaster Intelligentsia, will be having an open house at the Roasting Works on Fulton Ave. in Chicago. You're invited to try a cup of the Geisha for yourself that evening and then take home some Hacienda la Esmeralda non auction lot coffee to brew later at home.

If you can't get up to Chicago for the open house and still want to try the Geisha you can order from the Intelli web site or just email/call me and I'll place an order. The supply is limited and if you have to ask how much... O.K. it's expensive - $99/half pound or $55/quarter pound.

We should be getting the doors to the coffee house open soon and when we do I'll try to get a stock of the Hacienda Especial which is coffee from the same farm but not from the same lot that was in the auction. It should give us an idea of the Geisha taste for a lot less! We can make it in a press pot or you can buy whole beans to take home.

Direct Trade Coffee article in the NY Times

Interesting story in the NY Times this week about Intelligentsia Coffee's Direct Trade business model. Times reporter Peter Meehan writes on how the "big three" micro-roasters in the USA - Intelligentsia, Stumptown and Counter Culture - travel the world developing and fostering relationships with coffee farmers. The hope in developing this "relationship coffee" is that we can have great coffees from micro terroirs just like in the wine trade and develop sustainable practices so that we can continue to have great coffees.

Quality in the cup is a lot easier to define than sustainability, then you start getting into Fair Trade, Rainforest, Shade-Grown and organic and all that which might be better left for another day over a good cup. Here is a link to Ethical Coffee where they give a quick overview of some of these programs. You can also go to the Direct Trade page at Intelli where they have bullet-pointed and codified the Direct Trade model. If you are more visual and have 9 min. go on and jump over to You Tube where there is a video by Geoff Watts about the Direct Trade Flor Azul Project in Nicaragua.

Thanks to IrishGirl at the Food & Wine Forum for the heads up and link to the Times story.