Revealed: Britain’s most expensive cup of coffee
As the price of coffee soars, those who wince at being charged £4 or more for their flat white might want to look away now.
Britain’s most expensive cup of coffee, at Shot – a small, dimly lit coffee bar decked with marble walls and tables in Mayfair – costs £265.
It is made using typica beans – a high-quality variety of arabica – from the Nakayama estate in Japan.
But despite the high price, those who fork out should expect few frills, with the brew available as an espresso, macchiato, flat white, americano, cappuccino or latte – no different to your standard London coffee shop.
Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood, a three-time UK barista champion and founder of Colonna Coffee, said it was very unusual for coffee to be grown in Japan, something he speculates contributes to the extravagant price of this particular drink.
“Hardly anyone grows coffee in Japan,” he said. “It typically grows in the tropics – either side of the equator – it’s very hard to grow in places like Japan and probably needs a lot of help.”
“Rarity is obviously sought-after in coffee, and most of the ‘fancy’ coffee people drink is all arabica,” he added. “Typica, which is what is used here, is not the most sought-after variety of arabica – I’ve never seen a typica that expensive before – which suggests the value is coming from the fact that it’s grown in Japan.”
Striving for perfection
According to Shot’s menu, its Japanese typica beans are courtesy of the Kishimoto family, which has produced this “exquisite coffee” on Okinawa Island since 2015.
The islands of Okinawa are one of the world’s Blue Zones, areas where a population has a life expectancy much higher than the global average.
“This coffee is reflective of the deeply-held Japanese value of striving for perfection,” a description on its menu reads.
Bags of the rare beans can be bought online and retail at £1,480 per kilo – suggesting quite a markup on the coffee shop’s part.
The drink is one of seven of the coffee shop’s “house special coffees”, which includes a £70 Savannah Zombie made from beans from Thiotte region of Haiti, and a £32 “St Helena”, from beans produced on the island’s Wrangham Estate.
Beans normally collector items
Mr Colonna-Dashwood, who was also a three-time world barista championship finalist, said Shot’s Japanese coffee was by far the most expensive he had ever seen, adding that it was quite unusual for such an exclusive variety to be sold in a coffee shop as they tend to be sold in bags as collector items.
“The most expensive coffee I’ve seen go at auction before was in Panama, which generally has the most expensive coffee, and that would be about $10,000 a kilo – which works out at £166 a cup before you put any profit for the roaster on top,” he said.
“You don’t normally see these coffees in a coffee shop. What you’d normally see is a collector or someone buying these coffees. I wonder how many cups of these they’ll actually sell.”
However, he noted that there is “definitely more of an audience for premium coffee than ever before”.
Another Mayfair coffee shop previously claimed to have “the most expensive cup of coffee in the UK” for £50, with only 15 servings available.
Queens of Mayfair was selling coffee made from the award-winning Cup of Excellence from Ethiopia – the world’s most prestigious annual competition and auction for coffee – which it bought at the auction for between £1500-£2,000 a kilo.
