Manhattan, NY – $12 A Cup Of Coffee Will Wake You Up

Manhattan, NY – Café Grumpy, a local coffee shop chain here in New York, is raising eyebrows with its new menu item: an expensive Ethiopian coffee brewed by the cup. “If the caffeine doesn’t wake you up, the price certainly will.”

The Manhattan location of Café Grumpy is selling the drink prepared from the handpicked Nekisse beans for $12 a cup.

“There are flavors you would expect in a really nice glass of wine — it’s a cacophony of nuances,” Steve Holt, vice president of Ninety Plus Coffee, the company distributing the beans said. “You detect flavors of apricot, pineapple, bergamot, kiwi and lime. The deeper tones are levels of chocolate, and the finish is super clean.”

And why is it so pricey?

“It is a higher-end coffee, and you have to take a lot of time developing and processing it,” said Holt. “Once the coffee is harvested, it is dried on a raised African drying bed — the actual coffee cherries never sit on the ground.”

But not everyone is impressed: “People have had bad reactions to the prices,” Colleen Duhamel, a coffee buyer and barista at Cafe Grumpy said. “They will think, ‘This place isn’t for me,’ and storm out.”

“I’ve spent $12 on a cocktail, but I’d be reticent to pay that much for a cup of coffee,” said Whitney Reuling, 25, after tasting samples provided by The NY Post. “It’s good — but I can’t taste the difference. My palate is not at an advanced level for coffee — a $2.50 cup is fine.”