The Most Expensive Coffee on Earth

Imagine you’ve just inherited a large sum of money and now you want to enjoy the best of everything.

Suddenly 3 to 4 dollars for a fancy Starbucks coffee no longer fazes your weekly budget, so much so that you want to go even further and find an even better, more exclusive coffee bean.

But if there any room left to go higher?

You have basically two options in the realm of truly expensive coffee: “pooped” coffee, or “unpooped” coffee.

This may sound like a joke, but it isn’t: the Illuminati of the coffee world have somehow discovered that coffee beans that pass through the digestive tracts of some animals become extra delicious on account of certain enzymes in the animals’ digestive systems that ferment the beans and reduce their acidity and increase their sweetness as a result.

Pooped Coffee

If you opt for the pooped route, there are still some additional choices you will have to make with respect to which animal has pooped your coffee beans.

The classic variety is the feral Indonesian civet, but other options include Elephants, Formosan Rock Monkeys from Taiwan, or Jacu Birds from Brazil. Check previous blog posts to find out more information about these different kinds of pooped beans.

If you truly want to find the best of the best, however, the consensus seems to be to go with Elephant Dung coffee. The amount of coffee you need to make 5-6 cups of espresso will cost around $70, which means that a pound will cost around $550, so if you want really expensive coffee than this is about the best you could do.

Unfortunately it is not easy to find as it is only sold at luxury Asian hotels as well as one store in Texas.

But if you aren’t able to find the Elephant dung variety, there’s no reason to scoff at the Indonesian civet coffee at $320 a pound. This coffee is also known as Kopi Luwak, and it’s pretty much guaranteed to impress your guests.

Be careful, however, because there is some counterfeit Kopi Luwak going around trying to capitalize on its high price tag.

Non-pooped Coffee

If the idea of poo and coffee together doesn’t sit well with you, there are still other options for super-expensive coffee that has not been digested by any animal.

There is a coffee from Panama called Hacienda La Esmeralda which sold at the 2013 Panama Auction at around $350 a pound.

This coffee can fetch such a high price on account of its being a many time first place award winner at the Specialty Coffee Association of America Roasters Guild. A large percentage of this coffee gets sold in Asia, however it can still be found in the US.

Now, just imagine what would happen if we could get some Hacienda La Esmeralda beans into an elephant…