In
2013, the Bird Barista spent only $0.44 per cup of certified
sustainable coffee that they brewed at home over the entire year.
Read all of the other stats from their year of coffee drinking and purchasing here:
Annual recap of how much we spend on coffee in a year
Here we are on year five of standardized tracking of how much the
two-person Coffee & Conservation household spends on coffee. We keep
track of each bag we buy, including shipping, since we purchase the
majority of our coffee online.
Of course, we never buy cheap, fast-food, commodity, or mystery
coffee. If we don’t know where it comes from, we don’t drink it.
Usually, most have
eco-certifications,
but since we have a lot of knowledge on how to research the source of
each coffee and gauge sustainability, we have traditionally purchased
other coffees that we know are sustainably-grown, but did not carry
certification.
Most consumers won’t go through this process, so
for 2013, we decided to buy only certified coffees:
organic, Rainforest Alliance, Smithsonian Bird-Friendly, or some
combination. I confess, a few bags were from farms we knew or discovered
did have certification, but were
not sold as such.
Of our 79 bags, around 15 were duplicates, sometimes the same farm
from different roasters. Sixty-two bags of coffee were certified
organic, and 28 were certified Rainforest Alliance; 11 had both
certifications. Five were also Bird-Friendly certified (of which organic
certification is required).
Despite buying exclusively eco-certified, specialty
coffee this year, we paid the lowest price per cup in our five-year
tracking history. Let us now put a fork in the myth, once and for all, that high-quality, sustainably-grown coffee “costs too much.”
Here are all the 2013 stats:
- 79 bags of coffee totaling 65.5 pounds.
- Total retail price for the coffee only = $1109. This year, we moved
to a more coffee-friendly community, so we were able to buy more coffee
locally and spend less on shipping, just $74. Our previous 5-year
average for shipping was $127. Our grand total was $1183 for the year.
- Cost per six-ounce cup: only $0.44 ($0.41 without
shipping), calculated using the common industry standard of 11 grams of
coffee beans by weight per 6 fluid ounces of water.
- The average price per pound including shipping this year was $18.08, or $16.95 excluding shipping.
Previous results
The five-year average is 63 pounds of coffee a year at an average of $20.04/lb, and $0.49 per 6-oz cup, including shipping.
We are not very typical consumers in two cost-inflating ways: 1) We
buy most of our coffee online and do not buy more than we can drink in
under two weeks, incurring high shipping costs; and 2) we buy from an
average of over 20 different roasters each year, in order to try a
variety of coffees, nearly always single origin farms and frequently
higher priced microlots. Had we only repeatedly purchased our favorite
locally-available coffees, our estimated cost for the year would have
been around $900 total, and $0.34 a cup.
Great coffee that helps support ecosystems and rural communities
worldwide is not too expensive for all of us to enjoy. You can calculate
how much a cup of coffee costs, based on the price of a bag of beans,
using the spreadsheet below (it’s a little temperamental, click on the
cells a little to get it to work).
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