About the world’s most prized coffees

The Cost of Specialty Coffee

In recent years, the term “specialty coffee” has entered everyday language more and more often, yet it remains unclear what it truly means and why some coffees can cost significantly more than conventional ones. The answer does not lie in a trend or in a “stranger” taste, but in a completely different production system, involving agriculture, sensory evaluation, international competitions, and a level of selection that applies to only a very small fraction of the coffee produced worldwide.

Specialty coffee emerged as a response to decades of industrial standardization. For much of the twentieth century, the market favored quantity, uniformity, and price stability, sacrificing the identity of the agricultural product. Different origins were blended together, botanical varieties ignored, and defects masked through very dark roasting.

Specialty coffee developed in the opposite direction, starting in the 1970s, when some professionals began treating coffee as one would treat wine or high-quality olive oil, recognizing the value of origin, variety, climate, and human labor. From a technical standpoint, a coffee can be defined as specialty only if it surpasses a minimum quality threshold during a standardized sensory evaluation known as cupping.

Who Defines the Quality of a Coffee

Certified tasters analyze aroma, flavor, acidity, sweetness, balance, cleanliness, and complexity, assigning a score out of one hundred. Only coffees that score above eighty points are classified as specialty, and those that achieve very high scores become objects of great interest for roasters, baristas, and collectors of microlots.

Within this world, there are also competitions that have played a fundamental role in making agricultural excellence visible. The most important is the Cup of Excellence, founded in the late 1990s with the goal of rewarding the best coffees produced in a given country.

The process is rigorous and transparent. Producers submit their best lots, which are evaluated blind by national and international juries through several successive rounds. Only a handful of coffees reach the final stage, and those that exceed a very high score threshold are auctioned online, where buyers from around the world compete to acquire them.

This mechanism has two main effects. On one hand, it allows producers to earn prices far higher than those of the traditional market, often several times the stock market price. On the other, it creates strong attention around agricultural quality, encouraging better farming practices, selective harvesting, experimentation with fermentation, and meticulous post-harvest care.

The Cup of Excellence takes place in many countries across Central and South America, in Brazil, and in some African nations, but not everywhere, as it requires highly complex evaluation and organizational structures.

The characteristics of the world’s most prized coffees

Alongside these competitions, there are also extremely prized coffees that do not pass through contests but become rare and expensive for structural reasons. Some come from uncommon botanical varieties, such as certain selections of Gesha or other ancient cultivars. Others are the result of unique microclimates, extreme altitudes, or tiny plots of land that produce only a few bags per year. In these cases, rarity is not constructed but intrinsic, and the price simply reflects the real scarcity of the product.

Another decisive factor is the labor involved. The finest coffees are almost always hand-harvested, selecting only ripe cherries, and undergo slow and complex processing. Controlled fermentations, whether natural or experimental, require technical knowledge, infrastructure, and involve a high risk of loss. A single mistake can compromise an entire lot. Drying, too, requires time, space, and constant attention. All of this increases costs, but it is also what allows for unique aromatic profiles.

The final price of these coffees is therefore not the result of arbitrary luxury, but of a short, fragile, and highly specialized supply chain. Added to this is the fact that only a very small percentage of global production can reach very high quality levels. Most of the coffee grown worldwide remains within the conventional market for climatic, economic, or structural reasons. Specialty coffee is not meant to replace it, but to offer a possible alternative and a different model.