(not a problem for you)

As a “marketing ploy” this one is pretty good. It isolates really excellent small crop coffees from small farmers in regions where that coffee might otherwise be blended into obscurity at a larger wet milling/dry milling facility and sold at commodity prices (which still lag below the cost of production in many regions). It encourages crop improvements, milling improvements and creates a model of sustainability for small producers.

Most Americans are still drinking preground, stale, robusta from a can. Or perhaps graduating to the coffee-flavored liquid candybars churned out by starbucks. To experience small crop artisan roasted coffee from different origins is to never go back to the overroasted swill from most large roasters.

I’ve had the privilege to see and roast the naked beans that lie under this clothing of luxury marketing. Superior coffee is superior by orders of magnitude. You might even argue that given the greater variety of flavor and aroma compounds found in coffee (over 850) as compared to wine that distinctions in quality appear on a broader scale.

I’d say that among coffee aficionados its less the vanity of “wise” consumers than the obsession and madness that comes from the seeking of a degree of excellence still not broadly acknowledged. Coffee geeks are a rare and crazy breed with little of the glamour or established tradition of wine, cheese or beer geeks. To most people coffee is just coffee.