Guatemalan Coffee Brings Highest Price Ever Paid for Coffee Beans

Would you pay more than $500 for a pound of coffee? Someone did yesterday in an online auction of Guatemalan coffees that included six micro-lots of coffee estimated to be among the best coffees in the world.

On Tuesday, Finca El Injerto auctioned off several microlots of coffee in advance of the July Cup of Excellence auction, which will feature their 2012 CoE winner, Finca El Injerto Paccamara, which was also sold in yesterday's auction. The record-breaking coffee, though, was Finca El Injerto's Mocca. The first 15 pound lot of this coffee sold last year at the Reserva del Comendador auction for a (then) record-breaking $211.50 per pound. This year, an 8 pound lot of El Injerto Mocca sold for $4,004, or $500.50 per pound. I poked around a bit but couldn't find the buyer of that lot. Oliver Strand of the NYT reports, however, that Stumptown picked up a 75 pound lot of Finca El Injerto Geisha for a mere $81.50 per pound, so all you folks on the lookout for more Geisha, there you go.

Meanwhile, in other coffee news, the price for Kenya slid to $148.79 for a 110 pound bag - $1.35 a pound. That's down from $155.73 just a week ago, largely because superior grade Kenya sold early, leaving only inferior grade beans for sale this late in the season, according to a Bloomberg article. Ans after what seems like months of negative publicity for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, yesterday GMCR announced that they'll be consolidating their three Massachusetts Keurig plants into one campus, in Burlington, Massachusetts. The new campus will be focused on R&D -- which recently resulted in the second generation Keurig coffee brewer  - the Vue system, which is not compatible with K-cups... perhaps because the patent on K-cup technology runs out in just a few months and Green Mountain will no longer be the only show in town for packaging coffee in the ubiquitous little plastic cups. 

Finally, on the personal front, today is my beautiful daughter's birthday. This year, instead of buying her a gift -- coffee-related or otherwise -- I spent three days working with her to create a dining room set. Yes, you heard that right. We started with a bunch of mismatched $5 yard sale chairs, a pair of floor speakers, a cabinet door, a French door and a pile of lumbe and ended up with a gorgeous almost-finished dining room set for six complete with a side bar and extra seating. It was her anniversary gift to her husband -- and it's gorgeous, if I do say so myself. It does leave me with having to come up with a suitable anniversary present that will fit in with it and complement the room.  Since the plan for the room is to host weekly brunches, I'm thinking a coffee brewing system -- they currently only own a French press -- is a good choice. I want something different to fit their style -- a little showy and memorable. I'm thinking a nice siphon brewer but I'm open to suggestions. Anyone?