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Tuesday morning was the Brazil Cup of Excellence internet auction. The Cup of Excellence competition identifies the top coffees from a country and makes them available to importers and roasters, rewarding winning farmers with high prices and global recognition.

Victrola once again participated as part of the Small Axe buying group - a hodgepodge of small and medium sized roasters united to obtain and share a selected lot. This alliance scored us a bag of the top ranking coffee in last month’s Bolivia CoE auction and we thought we might seize a bag of the top Brazil lot as well. Huddled around the laptop Tuesday morning we watched as the price climbed high enough to shake the resolve of many members of our buying group. When the digital smoke cleared, the last bidder standing was the coalition of Australia’s Instaurator and Vince Piccolo of Vancouver’s Caffe Artigiano paying a record-demolishing $49.75 a pound (about $79,000 for the 12 bags).

A bold move that will have some scratching their heads, but Vince and his crew plan on selling the coffee exclusively via their recently obtained Clover at $5 a cup. From Thursday’s Globe and Mail:

“It might seem crazy that we were prepared to pay that price,” said Mr. Piccolo, a 40-year-old former fine-dining restaurant owner. “But when you break it down by the cup, it is about the same price that people would pay for a mediocre glass of wine.”

Coffee pundit Chris Tacy hails it as “about damn time” and I agree that this is a good thing. The question is whether the publicity from these headline-grabbing purchases could lead to larger issues down the road. An unsophisticated market built on hype might encourage other less scrupulous businesses to get into marketing these amazing coffees without showing proper regard for roasting and the delicate nature of preparation. Already, mediocre Kona coffees, over-rated Jamaica Blue Mountain, stale Italian-branded cans of commodity grade swill, coffee crapped out by caged cats - such coffees typically sell for ridiculous prices with no regard for the real quality of the bean, skill of roasting or freshness. This could lead to further challenges in the already muddy battle for market segmentation (trying to filter the shit from the shine-ola) and could have negative consequences for great coffee farmers in the longer term. Developing a real and sustaining market for coffees of this caliber will require more retailers who are really working the long tail and developing higher bandwidth relationships with educated customers who can understand the brutal truth of roasted coffee shelf life and the tight parameters of proper brewing.

I think we are seeing the beginnings of this, but we still have a long way to go.

update: excellent breakdown from Chris Tacy on this topic.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 14th, 2006 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Coffee, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.