The Tail of the Comet

I stopped by Carriage House Cafe recently to share lunch, beverages and conversation with my main man Chris Deferio. After a while we got around to the subject of R Miguel and his ultra-pricey ultra-high-end coffees.

I'm just a regular consumer, so I pay retail prices for coffee most of the time. And while Jay, Tacy and others may be cheering the changes that $200/lb roasted coffee will bring, as a consumer I am anything but enthusiastic about it. But I appreciate the business strategy Miguel has undertaken to develop a luxury brand.

Actually I find the whole situation vaguely amusing for a couple of reasons:

Vaguely Amusing Point #1: Undoubtedly there are rich people out there who are happy to pay very high prices; in fact, paying $200/lb validates (to themselves) their transcendent good taste. But in a blind tasting, how many of these people could even tell which coffees were $200/lb and which were $12/lb?

Vaguely Amusing Point #2: One of the terms championed by Counter Culture, Intelligentsia and others is "transparency." In our context it means (among other things) that the consumer is educated in detail about where, when and how a particular coffee is sourced. The concept, I believe, is to develop a consumer awareness of the remarkable variety and richness that coffee origins have to offer. Yet when R Miguel names his coffees "Ambrosia" and "Nectar," it is the precise opposite of transparency. I guess you'd call it "opacity" instead.

Is opacity the next step in our coffee evolution? In other words, will roasters with a proprietary offering "let the coffee speak for itself," but only from behind a black curtain, so that no one can tell who's talking?

It will be interesting to see how these two opposing approaches play out in the marketplace. Actually, although their marketing approaches are very different, I'd bet that Miguel, Peter and Geoff differ a lot less in the way they deal with farmers.

At one point in our conversation I repeated to Deferio a comment that Mark Prince had made. In a cup of excellence auction, it wasn't a good sign that one coffee sold for an outrageous price per pound ($30, $50, $100, etc). A good auction was when ALL the coffees sold for $5 a pound, or perhaps more. THEN we'd be assured that there would be plenty of quality producers that could stay in business.

That's when Chris responded with his beautifully apt comet metaphor. Without its tail, a comet appears to be just a smudgy star among thousands of look-alikes. But once a tail appears, dragging through millions of miles of empty space, it becomes something really special.

R Miguel is that star. All by himself, his fancy-shmancy coffee isn't very important. But if his efforts produce a tail -- if a dozen or a hundred quality coffees are dragged in his wake and the market prices each one high enough so that a quality coffee producer can survive -- then the world of coffee will be broadened and illuminated by the light of a truly fantastic comet.