Pricey dishes customarily announce themselves. The $35 burger during Db Bistro Moderne has foie gras oozing out of a center. The $1,000 Golden Opulence Sundae during Serendipity 3 is arrayed with bullion leaf.
But during Round K cafeteria on New York’s Lower East Side, a crater of Astronaut coffee is unprepossessing. It’s a pour-over that takes a few mins to high and arrives in front of we in a lovely, yet not exceptional, china cup. The inky, brownish-red decoction arrives though decoration, and a crater costs $50.
Double-Digit Coffee
Coffee with large cost tags is apropos some-more common. Eleven Madison Park, voted a best grill in a universe (with a $295 tasting menu) has introduced a $24 coffee service. It’s done from chosen Colombian beans and brewed tableside.
Klatch Coffee Inc. in Southern California recently done sound with a crater of coffee that costs $55. Last year, a spit in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., was a usually U.S. association to measure a collect of awfully singular Esmeralda Geisha Canas Verdes Natural beans, from Panama. An additional evidence can be done for a chocolate-flavored Yemeni beans during adult to $240 per pound.
Round K does not have triple-digit tasting menus or fought-over beans. The miniscule café has a spit in a window, coffee bags for rugs, and My Korean Girlfriend breakfast sandwiches. What creates a Round K Astronaut coffee so pricey is what owners Ockhyeon Byeon does with a beans. He sends them into space.
Sky High
“I wanted to check a effects of windy vigour on coffee,” says Byeon. The thirtysomething, bleached-blond Korea local has a grade in electrical engineering from Konkuk University in Seoul and a tattoo of a molecular structure of caffeine on his right forearm. He started operative during coffee shops in college and became preoccupied by a chemical reactions involved. At Round K, he experiments with shower beans in sea H2O during Long Island’s Rockaways and explores a advantages of cold descent by solidified belligerent coffee and H2O in pressurized containers.
To make his Astronaut coffee, Byeon put one bruise of beans, sourced from a little plantation in Colombia, into a continue balloon and launched it into space from New Jersey. He estimates that it went about 30 miles up, roughly to a mesosphere. He recovered a heavily channel tape-wrapped package about 5 hours later, regulating GPS. When he non-stop a package, Byeon found a beans somewhat solidified and coated with water, a outcome of atmosphere pressure.
I invited coffee consultant Oliver Strand to suffer a crater of Astronaut coffee. (The coffee goes on and off Round K’s menu, formed on Byeon’s roasting schedule. He’s also offered 60-gram packages, good for dual servings, for $50.) Strand has visited roasters and farms around a universe and writes about coffee for such publications as a New York Times. This would be a priciest coffee he’s tasted that he didn’t decoction himself. At home, Strand has prepared Geisha coffee, a comparably pricey aria of Ethiopian beans grown in South America described as carrying records of bergamot and citrus.
There’s been a rush to copycat Geisha in countries such as Brazil. Even if a outcome isn’t amazing, a tag means that farmers—and coffee bars—can double their prices. “Everyone wants Geisha now,” says Strand. When a coffee initial became renouned about a dozen years ago, a biggest buyers were in a United States and Europe. Now a marketplace is biggest in Asia, privately Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Strand says this is partly a Starbucks Corp. effect.
“In America, Starbucks has determined a cost of a crater of coffee during $3 to $5. Some people will compensate more, though it’s tough to pierce distant over that. In China, they provide a $100 crater of coffee as another oppulance good, like a belt or a handbag. They’re not comparing it to another crater of coffee; they’re comparing it to a good steak.” Likewise in Japan, a little bag of beans can be presented as a gift, not distinct a ideal $200 melon.
The Verdict
Strand and we sat during Round K’s six-seat counter, vouchsafing a crater of Astronaut coffee cold so a flavors could come by fully. It was light, unwashed brown, with a soft, fruity scent. The season was sour and suggested licorice, generally soothing compared to Round K’s customary pour-over, that is done from a same (Earthbound) Colombian beans and costs $5.
Strand’s judgment: The coffee isn’t value $50—at slightest to him. “It competence be value $50 to someone else. Value is in a eye of a beholder. You’re profitable for a idea, and it is a flattering crater of coffee,” he tells me. Personally, we elite a egg cappuccino ($6.50), an impossibly rich, fluffy event with a yolk whisked into a prohibited espresso, and a skinny covering of honeyed churned cream and a powdering of sour cocoa. we systematic a second.