A $22 cup of coffee is an easy joke. It is also, at the handful of cafés actually charging it, a fairly thin margin.
Start with the bean. A competition-grade lot from a small Colombian farm can run $18 to $30 a pound green. After roasting, that is roughly $40 a pound, or about $2.60 for the 30 grams in a single cup. Water, filtered and remineralized, adds pennies. The paper filter, the rinse, the scale, the grinder burrs — call it another dollar.
Where the money goes
Then there is the part customers never see: eighteen minutes of trained labor, a barista who can taste the difference between a stalled extraction and a good one, and a lease in a neighborhood where the rent is the real luxury ingredient.
At Foxglove Coffee, the $22 cup is a single-origin pour-over served with a tasting card and a small glass of the same coffee brewed three ways. It sells out most weekends. The café makes about $6 on it.
“People think we are getting rich,” says owner Lena Ortiz. “We are getting to buy better coffee.”