Starbucks St. Helena Reserve Coffee
Starbucks St. Helena Reserve Coffee has landed at the Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room in Seattle.
My understanding is that the Roastery will only offer 20 pounds of it beginning Monday, August 1, 2016, and the remainder will be online only.
The price point makes it, by far, the most expensive Starbucks coffee ever offered to date, blowing all past whole bean coffee prices out of the water. This coffee will retail for $10 an ounce, or $80 for 8 ounces.
Spanning 47 square miles in the South Atlantic Ocean, St. Helena, is a volcanic tropical island, which is barely a speck on the map. It’s located about halfway between South America and Africa. The St. Helena tourism website says that the population, known as the 'Saints' numbered about 3,800 at the end of 2012.
I recommend this website here for views of how gorgeous this remote island is.
Starbucks purchased 100 kilograms of the coffee, one-third of the farm's entire production for the year. I'm making a guess, but my estimate would be that Starbucks received about 220 pounds. Coffee loses some of its weight during the roasting process (the loss of moisture inside the bean) and so after roasting, I'm assuming that Starbucks ended up with something like a grand total of 175 pounds of coffee to sell.
Starbucks first made mention of this rare coffee in this blog post here.
