PRESS - TIMEOUT CHICAGO - NO AVERAGE (CUPPA) JOE

By Heather Shouse
Photograph by Nicole Radja

Most coffee retailers pay about two bucks for a pound of raw coffee, roast it up and sell it to you at a crazy profit. So just imagine what would happen if raw coffee cost not two dollars a pound, but $50. That’s the situation at Chicago-based Intelligentsia Roasting Works: It recently won an auction for 100 pounds of coffee from Panama—a “Geisha” varietal from the Hacienda la Esmeralda farm—for $51.95 a pound, the highest price ever paid. The price for you: $50.25 a half-pound (an almost 100 percent markup). Each of Intelligentsia’s three cafés (see www.intelligentsiacoffee.com for locations) has 15 pounds up for grabs, its online store has 45 and coffee purchaser Geoff Watts has claimed the remaining ten for himself. We sat down with Watts and roaster Steven Rogers to figure out what’s so great about the stuff.

TOC: What’s the big deal with this coffee?
Geoff Watts: I was on the jury for the Best of Panama competition when I tasted it. That’s a coalition of coffee producers, exporters and millers with the purpose of helping farmers market and sell their best coffees through auctions. We ran into this one coffee that was completely different than everything else. It had Ethiopian character: lemony floral, somewhere between lemongrass and sweet jasmine, and a little citrus. Incredibly aromatic, like there was light beaming out of it.

TOC: If it’s like Ethiopian coffee, which you can buy for two bucks a pound, why pay $50 for this one?
GW: Well, all coffee came from Ethiopia originally, but most coffees grown throughout Central and South America now are generations removed. This Geisha varietal had been brought to Costa Rica sometime in the ’50s or ’60s and it had been growing under everybody’s noses without anyone having taken the time to separate it from the rest of the coffees. This farmer noticed the trees were different, the beans were different, so he decided to take it and enter it in the competition as an individual varietal without letting it be combined.

TOC: It tastes different from how the same varietal from Ethiopia would?
GW: You’ve got an Ethiopianlike profile but handled, processed and picked by a farmer in Panama with all the resources. These guys are not struggling farmers. They’re very well off, they have full-time agronomists on their farms, gorgeous facilities, and so they’re able to take this coffee with all of this natural potential and process it with the utmost, highest level of technical proficiency. It’s like the best of both worlds.

TOC: But for the average coffee drinker, is the difference in taste worth the extra money?
GW: It’s a pretty obvious difference for anyone, but I do think it’s the real connoisseur who will freak out. A $50 half pound seems crazy, but people don’t balk at paying the same for a bottle of wine that gives them six glasses. A half pound of coffee is 30 cups.

TOC: So, Steven, do you feel a lot of pressure roasting beans that are this expensive?
Steven Rogers: No more than roasting espresso for Matt Riddle competing in the World Barista Championship. With the Geisha, it’s an honor to transform something as pristine as this. If there’s 40 pounds to be roasted, I’ll split it up and do two batches of 20 so then if I mess up I’ll only lose $1,200. Plus, then the excitement of roasting it goes twice as long.

TOC: What will you do when it’s gone?
GW: I’m gonna cry, and then I’ll go back for the Geisha at next year’s harvest. Like an old friend you have to wait six months to see again.