Housekeeping

I made the first post on this website on this day in 2005. I initially envisioned a modest collection of resources explaining the importance of “shade-grown coffee” to biodiversity, birds in particular. As an ornithologist, I knew how critical wintering habitats in the tropics are to the birds that I studied here in North America. As a coffee drinker, I was frustrated and surprised that there was no single go-to place for consumers that would enable them (us!) to make an informed choice about what coffees were grown under ecologically-responsible methods. I thought I would just whip one up!

Here I am, fifteen years and hundreds of posts later. There were so many layers of nuance to explore: not only ecology, but also agronomy, economics, marketing, and the social and cultural aspects of coffee. I attended trade shows, and visited coffee farms. And drank a lot of coffee.

There has been so much evolution in the coffee world over these years. Consolidation among the big players in coffee buyers (often to private ownership) has made it nearly impossible for me to provide what I considered to be some of the most valuable data on this site: which corporations owned which brands, and how much certified or eco-certified coffee they purchased. A proliferation of certifications or sustainability claims, with increasingly copious criteria and similar but unequal definitions, has made my other crucial task — attempting to explain what these labels, standards, and seals mean to the consumer — tedious at best.

The coffee and product reviews have been fun, and I have especially enjoyed writing about birds and biodiversity. But the difficulty in updating information on certification standards and corporate ownership, purchasing, and sustainability issues that I consider the core of my mission has me uncertain as to the future of this site. So I’ve while had some long dry spells without posting, depending on what was going on in my own life, now I feel I am at a crossroad.

I welcome constructive comments on what direction this website should take as I ponder the future. Just leaving the site here indefinitely is likely not an option. Although I am now accepting donations, I haven’t tried very hard to monetize this site because my emphasis was on providing information, not making money. As a recent semi-involuntary retiree, I don’t think I can commit to supporting the site long-term.

Thank you, readers and friends, for this interesting journey. We’ll see where the future takes us.

Annual recap of how much I spend on coffee in a year

I started this five years ago: I was curious about the variety of coffees I consumed, and particularly about how much I spent on coffee since price seems to be such a driving force when consumers are faced with choosing between cheap coffee and slightly higher priced certified/sustainable coffee. My recording method has been standardized since 2009, but I have refined the method used to calculate price per cup. I was basing it on tablespoons per bag and cup, and I prefer a ratio of coffee to water that is higher than typically recommended. I’ve now gone to using the common industry standard of 11 grams of coffee beans by weight per 6 fluid ounces of water. I have amended my previous calculations, too. Here are my 2012 stats (coffee for a 2-person household):

• 87 bags of coffee totaling 65 pounds.
• Total retail price for the coffee only = $1293. I buy most of my coffee online, so I spent $113 on shipping, for a grand total of $1406 for the year.
• Cost per six-ounce cup: only $0.52 ($0.48 without shipping).
• The average price per pound (not including shipping) this year was $21.60. This includes four bags of really high-quality coffee which each cost over $45/lb. Most average coffee consumers will be able to bring even this price down substantially without compromising sustainability, or taste.
• 77% of the coffees were certified organic, Rainforest Alliance, Smithsonian Bird-Friendly, or some combination. This is not to say the remainder were not sustainably-grown. I am do my best to research the source of each coffee and gauge sustainability, since not all farmers can afford certification. I’ve found that the last couple of years some of my favorite producers have dropped organic certification, and other coffees are produced under certification but not sold as such. So while I’ve tried to buy only certified coffees, some were not, but none were cheap, fast-food, commodity, or mystery coffee. If I don’t know where it comes from, I don’t drink it.

Previous results

My four-year average (discarding 2008 stats) is 63 pounds of coffee a year at an average of $20.53/lb, and $0.50 per 6-oz cup, including shipping. This has been remarkably consistent over the years.

Some price comparisions and the price of convenience:

If I drank the same amount of coffee, but used only K-Cups, my annual cost would go from $1300 (average including shipping and some very high-priced, award winning coffees) to just over $2000! This was calculated using inexpensive Folgers K-Cups priced in bulk at Amazon (not only cheap, but one of the worst coffees you can buy in terms of sustainability). The cost only goes up with “better,” organic, or bold (stronger) K-Cups*. So if you are using K-Cups because it’s convenient, you are not only paying through the nose, you are producing landfill-choking waste one little non-recyclable K-Cup at a time. That’s asinine. And please don’t tell me you use a single-cup brewer so you don’t waste coffee. If you are wasting $700+ worth of coffee a year, something is seriously wrong.

I think I’ve shown that “But I can’t find organic/Bird-Friendly/Rainforest Alliance/etc. coffee around here” is a poor excuse for not drinking it. My shipping costs — with nearly all my coffee purchased online — have averaged less than $130 a year (or $2.50/wk). It’s not hard to find free or reduced shipping specials, or flat rate shipping, online. You could get Smithsonian Bird-Friendly/organic certified coffee automatically delivered to you once a month from Birds and Beans for $105/year (even more variety from Birds and Beans Canada). Or design your own monthly coffee delivery from any of Caribou Coffee’s 100% Rainforest Alliance certified varieties for $75/year. Or buy more coffee locally than I do. For example, Birds and Beans is expanding nationwide, and if you don’t have a Caribou store near you, many retailers like Target carry it.  Ask your local retailer to carry your own favorite eco-certified coffees!

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.

*You can fiddle with the math yourself. Regular K-Cups hold 9 grams, other types hold varying amounts. There are about 454 grams in a pound, so about 50 K-Cups to a pound.

Annual recap of how much I spend on coffee in a year

I started this several years ago, and I think the method has now been more or less standardized. See below for previous results and caveats.

This year, coffee prices were higher, but I was able to spend a little less on shipping due to taking advantage of specials, or buying more bags per order. Here are my 2011 stats:

• 89 bags of coffee totaling 63 pounds.
• Total retail price for the coffee only = $1297. I buy most of my coffee online, so I spent $123 on shipping, for a grand total of $1420 for the year. It’s not too hard to find free or reduced shipping specials online.  Note that my shipping costs only work out to $1.38 a bag.
• Cost per six-ounce cup: only $0.54 ($0.49 without shipping).
• I buy a lot of really high-quality coffee. The average price per pound (not including shipping) this year was $22. The big outlier was a half-pound of Finca La Valentina Geisha from PT’s Coffee, which retailed at the equivalent of almost $120/lb. Including that coffee, I indulged in 23 bags of coffee that retailed for over $20/lb. If only all of life’s simple luxuries were so cheap!
• This year, I took a closer look at the top ten or so coffees that I had flagged as my favorites this year. The list revealed some interesting trends — I’ll be doing a separate post on them shortly.

Previous results

My three-year average (discarding 2008 stats) is 62 pounds of coffee a year at an average of just over$20/lb, and $0.49 per 6-oz cup, including shipping.

Other facts about my 2011 coffee:

• I purchased from 25 roasters, 8 of which were new to me.
• All but two bags were from single-country origins, representing 20 countries.
• I buy mostly single-estate coffee so that I can do research on the source and gauge sustainability, as not all farmers can afford certification. At some point in the fourth quarter of the year, I began recording certifications, and tried to go back and look them up for older coffees (not all of which were still available). Of my 89 bags, 31 were certified organic, with some of those having additional certifications; another 8 were certified by by Rainforest Alliance only.

As I’ve said previously, great coffee that helps support ecosystems and rural communities worldwide is not too expensive for all of us to enjoy.

I’ve posted this before, but if you’d like to calculate how much a cup of coffee costs, based on the price of a bag of beans, just punch in the price and weight of the bag here: