$12 Cup Ethiopian Coffee Raising Eyebrows

Above: The Chelsea location of Cafe Grumpy in Manhattan is

now offering the high-end Nekisse beans from Ethiopia made

using the store’s $11,000 Clover brewing system.

Tadias Magazine

By Tadias Staff

Published: Monday, May 3, 2010

New York (Tadias) – Café Grumpy, a local coffee shop chain here in New York, is raising eyebrows with its new menu item – an expensive cup of joe from Ethiopia.

As The New York Post put it: “If the caffeine doesn’t wake you up, the price certainly will.”

The Manhattan location of Café Grumpy is selling the drink brewed from the handpicked Ethiopian Nekisse beans for $12 a cup.

“There are flavors you would expect in a really nice glass of wine — it’s a cacophony of nuances,” Steve Holt, vice president of Ninety Plus Coffee, the company distributing the beans, told The NY Post. “You detect flavors of apricot, pineapple, bergamot, kiwi and lime. The deeper tones are levels of chocolate, and the finish is super clean.”

And why is it so pricey?

“It is a higher-end coffee, and you have to take a lot of time developing and processing it,” said Holt. “Once the coffee is harvested, it is dried on a raised African drying bed — the actual coffee cherries never sit on the ground.”

But not all New Yorkers are impressed. “People have had bad reactions to the prices,” Colleen Duhamel, a coffee buyer and barista at Cafe Grumpy said. “They will think, ‘This place isn’t for me,’ and storm out.”

“I’ve spent $12 on a cocktail, but I’d be reticent to pay that much for a cup of coffee,” said Whitney Reuling, 25, after tasting samples provided by The Post. “It’s good — but I can’t taste the difference. My palate is not at an advanced level for coffee — a $2.50 cup is fine.”

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