Why Did This Espresso Cost $335?

Something a little different and hopefully fun today. A rare opportunity to taste a fancy thing…
Important note: While I want to make a series of these videos, they’ll appear when opportunities to taste different expensive coffees pop up, rather than sequentially.

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– Today I’m in London to go to a coffee shop that serves a £265 shot of espresso. That’s $335 US dollars in modern currency and it will be, in my 20 years in coffee, the most expensive cup of coffee I’ve ever bought. And you might have some questions, why would I do this, why is it so expensive and is it gonna be worth it? So what I figured we’d do is have like a little whistle stop tour of London on the way to the coffee shop while I answer those questions. And the first one is, why would I do this? Well, turns out when coffee shops put really expensive cups of coffee on the menu, the press write about it and people send me those articles. You know, coffee’s usually cheap. How can it be so expensive? Is this worthwhile? Is it ridiculous? Is it absurd? Well, I’ve thought about it and I think there are three reasons why a cup of coffee might be very expensive. One, scarcity. There’s only a very tiny quantity of this particular coffee produced. Therefore, getting to taste it is a rarefied experience. I guess the laws of supply and demand apparently say that should make it very expensive. A good example from the past would maybe be something like Kopi Luwak, its supply was pretty constrained, got very expensive, but Kopi Luwak is kind of a whole other thing. And we did make a video about that. Two is competition. This is typically where the coffee industry itself has driven the price up, usually through something like an auction. The Cup of Excellence is a classic example of this where the coffee roasters, they really want the coffee based on its taste and they’ve bid the price up and up and up until it’s become very expensive. A great example from the past would be Hacienda La Esmeralda, when it first brought Gesha to market. Or three, preparation. The coffee might have been aged a certain way or brewed in a way that’s kind of convoluted or complicated that has really added to the cost. So once you go down the coffee rabbit hole and you realize that the more you’re spending on your coffee beans, the better your coffee brews are tasting, well then the more you may be tempted to buy one of these really expensive cups of coffee just to know maybe how good coffee can be. And so what I wanna do is make a series of videos, one about each of those reasons coffee might be expensive and kind of give you an idea of what you’re gonna get for your money. So we’ve come to the relative calm and quiet of Green Park so I can tell you a little bit about the coffee that I’m gonna be drinking because it is very interesting. It’s expensive for that first reason. Scarcity. This is a coffee grown on the island of Okinawa in Japan. And to be honest, I didn’t even know Japan grew coffee. Now it’s from the Nakayama Estate, a small farm there. It’s a Typica variety and it’s a natural process, which I think is important. The natural process means that after the cherries were picked, they were dried completely and then sort of hulled and broken open to get to the seeds inside that are dry. This is different to the washed process, for example, where you pick the cherry, immediately squeeze the seeds out, ferment it a little to break down any flesh stuck to it, and then wash it clean before drying it. Has an impact on taste. I suspect we’ll talk about that a little bit later on. Now having looked at it, the Nakayama Estate seems to be very small. It seems to have maybe about 1000 coffee trees. A coffee tree may produce, let’s say three to maybe 400 grams of raw coffee a year. And so their total production may be around 300 kilos. And that’s of all qualities. The best stuff will be a smaller portion of that. And that means that in terms of exports to the UK, say, it may be a tiny quantity, it might be 20 or even 50 kilos, but maybe even less. Notably, if I went to the Nakayama website, all of the coffee that they sell is kind of a blend of their coffee. You can’t buy their coffee on its own. They’ve blended it with other origins for you to drink, which I thought was notable and spoke to how constrained their supply is. Now it’s gonna be expensive in part because it’s a tiny supply, but also because of the cost of production. In Japan, people tend to be higher earners and that will have an impact on the cost of production. This tends to happen in a variety of different places. A good example would be say California, where they’ve recently started growing coffee and coffees grown in California have much higher costs associated with them. They might be say $300 to $400 a kilo compared to say $50 to $100 a kilo for kind of typical specialty coffee. Now it’s notable that it’s the island of Okinawa, ’cause it kind of classifies therefore as an island coffee. These are a kind of class of coffees. Generally speaking, good quality coffee needs altitude because altitude means lots of sunlight in the daytime and then cool temperatures at evening. So you’re feeding the plant during the day and then slowing maturation at night. Lower altitudes tend to have much warmer evenings. The exception are islands because the cool breeze comes in at night and they have cooler nights. And so you get coffee from places like Cuba or Kona, Hawaii, or St. Helena. And again, altitude doesn’t seem to matter as much. I looked at the Nakayama Estate, it seems to be between one and 200 meters above sea level, which is really relatively low. All of this talk of scarcity gets us to the complicated world of price elasticity. What should you charge for something just because it’s hard to access? And some would argue, "Well, whatever someone will pay for it, that’s the right price." Now, if you have a lot of money, I guess one of the things you can access are just things that other people can’t because they’re so expensive. You’re gonna buy experiences, you’re gonna buy wine or caviar or food or in this case, coffee. If you’re gonna access these kind of things, you’re gonna come to this very weird bit of London, Mayfair, a place where I can barely afford to even look at the things in the windows, of wild ridiculous cars, absurd property prices, and just all around strangeness. Okay, so the coffee shop we’re coming to is a place called Shot here in Mayfair. They’re trying to be London’s kinda luxury coffee bar and they have a menu of special coffees. Typically it’s kind of island coffees. There’s Jamaica Blue Mountain on there, there’s Kona, there’s Helena, of course there’s some Kopi Luwak. And at the bottom there’s the Nakayama Estate, which is what I’m gonna go and order. Now we did contact them and say "Can we film inside?" And they said no, which is totally okay. I can totally understand having a lovely place and not wanting some loudmouth YouTuber with a camera coming in and disturbing your clientele. So I’m gonna go inside, order some coffee, bring it back outside and we’ll talk about it. (traffic rumbling) Do you know, I don’t know what I was expecting. It’s, so the first thing I should acknowledge, the barista has an impossible job because the idea that something could be sort of worth £265 from a taste perspective alone, is kind of impossible. What I’m buying, what I’m gonna taste is experiential. It’s kinda wider than that. Lemme talk about how it tastes though. Can smell that it’s a natural process. There’s some kind of fermented, dried fruit smells on the nose. The cup is very nice. Got a gold spoon as well. Give a little stir. It’s pulled a little bit more as a lungo, which is good. (traffic rumbling) Yeah, okay. Lots of dried fruit. It reminds me of a natural process, first and foremost, rather than kind of a coffee from a place. It’s kind of a kind of process aroma so far. Let me taste. Way, way more acidity than I was anticipating. In a good way. This is relatively low grown coffee and so I expected less acidity. It’s juicy, it’s bright. I don’t know if it tastes distinctly different to other coffees I’ve tasted where it has like a Japanese quality to it. Whereas, you know, with say, Ethiopian coffees, you can taste them and know that they’re Ethiopian. It’s a well brewed shot, barista did well, really nice barista in there. Shout out for being very hospitable and accommodating to our difficult request. A little dry in the finish, decent body to it, actually, nice texture. As it cools, there’s a touch of woodiness in there maybe? Like you can sort of detect a little bit of that low altitude, but I don’t think it has a sort of origin characteristics that’s particularly unusual or wild or distinct to it. It tastes like ripe coffee from reasonable altitude. Processed well, roasted well, but its taste and its price I don’t think are particularly connected. Is it £265 tasty? Can anything be £265 tasty? I’ve bought getting to say that I’ve drunk a coffee from Japan and I’ve bought getting to say that I spent £265 on an espresso. Does that make it worth it? That really depends on who you are and what that money is worth to you. If you wanna buy a story to tell people, yeah, I get it. If you’re trying to buy just the best tasting coffee experience, then I think generally scarcity coffees aren’t it. Something like competition coffees, where people have like competed for them because of their taste. I think they may be better value, but this is a £265 shot of espresso. And now I wanna hear from you, what’s the most expensive cup of coffee you’ve ever had in your life? And more to the point, was it worth it? People ask me all the time what the most expensive cup I’ve had was. Now I have a very good answer, but I want to hear your thoughts down in the comments below. And if you do see other coffees that fit the bill for the other reasons that coffees get very expensive, either you know, these kind of competitively priced coffees that the competitions have driven them up, the auctions, or interesting process, brew, strange things. Gimme a link down in the comments below. And for now, I say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.