Filter Coffee Maths.

Filter Coffee Maths.

The last thing most of our customers do is think about money when they are making their favourite coffee or tea drink, and that’s a really good thing. Today in my little wordy analogy, I wanted to compare a 200ml, delicious brew of filter coffee (made at home) with other drinks.

So let’s compare a brew of single estate  Brazil with a nice juicy Kenya. Two different coffees, with different price points.

At random, I am going to choose Maranhao as the Brazil option.  This coffee is £5 per 250g at retail and I am going to choose Kenya Gitura, which is £7.50 per 250g.

If we start off with the usual recipe: 12g of coffee for a 200ml brew, be it in Aeropress, V60, clever dripper etc.

Our Maranhao works out at 24p and our Kenya is 36p. Wow!

Let’s up this. Saturday morning, long chat over breakfast, let’s make a litre in one go;

Maranhao £1.20 (60g of coffee) Kenya Gitura  £1.80

What other drinks could you buy that could taste this good?

Let’s say you liked Rioja? If you put in Rioja Reserva into Google: it throws up £5.50-22, without hunting. Believe you, me I can find more expensive wines if I tried!

Let’s play: 200ml glass at the bottom end £1.46 and £5.87 at the top end of these two, this is between 1200 and 1800% more expensive than the 12g/200ml of filter coffee.

This is just for two polar opposite cups of coffee that are beautifully produced, but incredible value if I don’t say so myself!  There is a mad amount of work that goes into getting speciality coffee to a point of consumption.

Arguably, it wouldn’t really matter to most people if they paid £5 or £15 for a bag of coffee. That litre brew would still only be £3.60 at the top end. There are many people who perceive the amount they pay as being a benchmark for the quality they receive. That’s not really how it works in reality.

The reality is that really good coffee doesn’t have to cost much more than this, at this moment in history. I always like to think, that coffee should be an affordable luxury.

*For the sake of simplification, carriage has not been taken into account with this analogy.