Caroline: These two cups of coffee look identical,
but this one is $3, and this one is $75.
$75 for one cup of coffee.
Hm.
Wow. Joe: Mhm.
Interesting.
Klatch Coffee carries the Elida Geisha Green Tip Natural.
This coffee is sold for $803 per pound.
That's about $75 for an 8-ounce cup.
The more expensive coffees are obviously,
it's supply and demand.
Generally, they're small supply
and a lot of people wanting to have
some of the best coffees.
So normally, around the world,
each country will have an auction for the best coffees.
Caroline: The coffee got the highest bid
at the Best of Panama coffee auction in 2018.
Before we can taste it for ourselves,
we visited Klatch's roastery in Southern California
to learn about their roasting process.
The team samples new coffees every day.
We'll try a hundred coffees
to find one that we want to buy.
So we're looking for something that's really good,
that highlights the flavors that we want from that origin,
from that region.
For Brazil, we want kind of a nice chocolatyness.
From a Colombia,
we might want more of a citrus, a sweetness.
Sometimes for some coffees from Ethiopia,
we want these fruit notes that are coming through.
They're just wonderful,
and berries, and strawberries, and stone fruit,
and peach coming through in coffee.
You can taste it.
It's just amazing.
Was there ever a time
that there was, like, a coffee on the table,
and everyone was kind of like, "This is it.
This is, like, a game changer."
Mike: Oh, yeah.
It happened in Panama when I was a judge
on the Elida, on the one that went for $800.
Oh, wow. And everybody's like,
"Oh, my gosh, amazing coffee."
It starts with sourcing beans,
but once they arrive,
we have these green, unroasted coffee beans.
And that's the seed or
the bean at the center of the coffee cherry.
And we bring those in, we weigh 'em out, and we roast 'em.
So during the roasting process, we add 'em to the roaster.
We manipulate both the heat, the flame, and the air flow.
So it's kind of a combination of conduction and convection
to manipulate the roast
to where it's just right,
and when it's just right,
we drop it into the cooling tray
where a vacuum of air sucks on it,
cools it down quickly.
From there it goes up the destoner,
and it removes if there's any foreign objects in there,
which there shouldn't be,
but just to make sure everything's good.
Then, of course, we package it, and we weigh it,
so it happens both by hand
or with the machines that actually weigh it for us.
Seal it up, and we ship it all over.
Caroline: And now, the fun part.
So Joe and I are at Klatch Coffee,
and we have two different types of coffee with us.
We both have a regular cup of coffee,
and we have the world's most expensive coffee.
I feel like with this one
I'm already kind of like smelling
and getting a little bit of the aroma,
and it smells, like, citrusy,
but it also smells kind of sweet.
We learned how to smell coffee earlier.
We are coffee experts now.
Definitely more of, like, a coffee
that I would have every day.
Yeah.
Flavor's not too strong.
It tastes like regular coffee, a little earthier.
Caroline: Some flavors you can expect
from the Elida Geisha
range from berry, citrus, mango, papaya, and peach.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, that's excellent.
That is like leaps and bounds
ahead of what we just had before here
or just any cup of coffee I've had, you know.
Wow. Joe: Mhm.
Interesting.
It is a little more citrusy than this cup.
I would love to have this more.
It's just a little out of my price range by about $71.
But it's excellent, I love it.
I would love for more people to try it.
My wife drinks coffee.
I know she would love this too.
For day-to-day,
I probably would still have, like, my regular coffees
only because, like, I can't buy this coffee all the time.
But I think this would be such an awesome gift
to give to someone who's, like, a coffee fanatic.
I think people really get this for that experience.
Not much to, like, you know, chug it down every day.
Not everything that we carry is just the highest,
most expensive coffee.
What I really try to do as a buyer
is to find value for my customers.
You know, I want to find a great coffee
because not everybody can afford to have, you know,
top-shelf every single day.
But they all deserve something good,
and that's what I try to find.
But it's nice to treat yourself once in awhile
to a rare, exotic, and wonderful treat.
'Cause even the best, highest,
most expensive coffee in the world, you know,
granted per cup, we might be selling for $75.
But it's a once-in-a-lifetime kind of treat,
and that's what we try to bring.