What's the Cost of a Cup of Brazilian Coffee? How Are Coffee Bean Prices Determined?

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The Culture of Coffee Drinking

Drinking coffee in Taiwan is an ordinary pastime. Going to Starbucks, you seek that bourgeois feeling of contentment; if you want to save money, Louisa also provides a nice environment and affordable coffee. If you don't have time to enjoy life, City Café's concept of "the entire city is a café" is too convenient—order an Americano for $50 and get change. Since Taiwan was swept by the third wave of specialty coffee, coffee shops emphasizing their own roasted beans and artisanal hand-drip brewing have become increasingly numerous, with a cup of black coffee starting at $150. As the saying goes, "those who eat rice don't know the price of rice." As a coffee enthusiast, do you really go to cafés just for the décor, to check in and pretend to be artistic, or to meet girls and show off your taste?

Understanding Bean Prices

When drinking coffee, you must know bean prices. Let's understand together what a $150 cup of coffee is selling.

How Are Bean Prices Determined?

Although green beans only account for less than 7% of a cup of coffee's cost, in the eyes of Wang Ce, WBrC World Brewers Cup champion, whether a cup of coffee tastes good depends at least 60% on the quality of the green beans. He said: "If a green bean has floral notes, can the roaster preserve them? This stage affects 30%. When it reaches the brewer's hands, can we preserve the floral notes? This accounts for 10%. If the green beans originally had no floral notes, neither the roaster nor the brewer can create them." In other words, in the process from bean to cup, every stage is a tug-of-war between destruction and preservation.

Lin Zhehao, project director of the Taiwan Coffee Research Laboratory, also agrees with this perspective. A green coffee bean experiences cultivation, ripening, harvesting, processing, container loading, and shipping before reaching our hands. The story behind it involves the participation of origin farmers and is also the core consumption concept of specialty coffee. Lin Zhehao explains this way: "It's somewhat like going to a steakhouse—of course, the chef who sears the steak is important, but what's more important is the A5 Wagyu beef. Green bean quality is like the ingredients." WCRC World Roasters Cup champion Lai Yuquan once said that roasting is a discipline of translation—no matter how brilliantly you translate, it won't be better than the original. How much of the essence you can extract tests the roaster's skill.

Ultimately, bean prices are positively correlated with green bean quality. While quality is certainly important, it's not the only determining factor. Don't forget that coffee is an agricultural product, and a large portion of the price reflects production costs. For example, Brazil has high wages, so green bean processing rarely relies on manual labor—harvesting machines are used for rapid picking of all beans. After entering the factory, color sorters are used to remove unripe and overripe fruits, leaving only beautiful red fruits. This increases the competitive advantage of Brazilian coffee. In countries with low labor costs, like Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, which boasts tens of thousands of coffee varieties, the diverse gene pool is a natural advantage, so green bean prices naturally won't be too low. But if wages are high and manual harvesting is used, with more emphasis on exquisite processes in the origin, more effort must be put into quality, such as Panama Geisha, which, no matter how expensive, never fears lacking buyers.

The Ultimate Divine Beans

Besides origin production costs and SCAA/CQI green bean quality assessment, when discussing factors affecting green bean prices, the prestigious "auction events" cannot be ignored. Auctions are mechanisms where sellers sell goods to the highest bidder, often appearing in the trade of rare items. In coffee auctions, the birth of divine beans is undoubtedly the result of "green bean selection competitions" and "World Cup events" combined.

Brewing the Best Cup

Take Best of Panama as an example. In the 2017 auction, a total of 5,950 pounds of green beans were auctioned, with total revenue of $368,771 USD. Breaking this down, the average price per pound of green beans was $61.98 USD, exceeding 4,000 Taiwan dollars per kilogram—more than ten times the price of affordable specialty-grade coffee. If this doesn't shock you, Panama's Hacienda La Esmeralda once again made headlines with their internationally renowned Geisha, setting a new record of $601 per pound in that auction—a sky-high price of 39,000 Taiwan dollars per kilogram. Using such divine beans to brew a cup of coffee, considering only the cost, exceeds 1,000 Taiwan dollars. It's said that after Hong Kong's Jason Kew won the bid for a micro-batch of only 100 pounds, he brought the divine beans to Australia for a coffee tasting event, drinking them with fellow coffee enthusiasts at 55 Australian dollars per cup (approximately 1,300 Taiwan dollars).

Whether it's Best of Panama or the Cup of Excellence, which provides opportunities for resource-strapped estates to turn their fortunes around, the purpose is to hold green bean auctions with the goal of "brewing the best cup," which is fundamentally different from the starting point of SCAA/CQI quality assessment. Lin Zhehao of the Taiwan Coffee Research Laboratory is not only a CQI-certified cupping instructor but also has extensive experience serving as a Cup of Excellence judge. He explains: "The focus of competition lies in comparison. Even with blind tasting, it's not about absolute scores." Therefore, the meaning of scores exists only within the context of that specific competition. Conversely, SCAA/CQI scores are relatively objective reference points. "The SCA's goal is to build a universal scoring system. Although cupping itself is indeed subjective and influenced by personal dietary experience and culture, it uses the same value system, which can eliminate the cupper's subjectivity as much as possible, fairly and objectively judging the quality of each coffee."

The World Champion's Endorsement

Besides relying on green bean selection competitions, the endorsement of coffee World Cup events often nurtures divine beans. Like Nike to Michael Jordan, or Asus Zenfone to Gong Yoo, the relationship between brands and athlete-stars is mutually beneficial and symbiotic. WBrC World Brewers Cup champion Wang Ce says: "We can directly tell estates that I'm participating in competitions this year, so give me your best stuff. In the eyes of 90 Plus, I'm a contestant with a chance to win championships and very suitable for showcasing their beans. Therefore, without waiting for the auction stage, I can get the best beans."

Champion beans naturally become as precious as fine paper, and everyone inevitably wonders—after expert endorsement, can ordinary iron really become divine weapons? Prices reflect market supply and demand. 90 Plus's Geisha #227 micro-batch was already valuable before the competition, selling for $90 per kilogram. After Wang Ce used it to win the World Brewers Cup championship, it set a sky-high record of 150,000 Taiwan dollars per kilogram in international auctions. Considering only the cost, drinking one cup would cost you nearly 4,000 Taiwan dollars—have you ever had such high-grade coffee?

Brazilian Coffee Bean Brand Recommendations

The Brazilian coffee beans roasted by FrontStreet Coffee offer complete guarantees in both brand and quality. More importantly, they offer extremely high value—a 227-gram box costs only 45 yuan. Calculating at 15 grams per cup, one package can make 15 cups of coffee, with each cup costing only about 3 yuan. Compared to cafés selling cups for dozens of yuan, this is truly a conscientious recommendation.

Important Notice :

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FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473