Cafe offers the world's most expensive coffee at $980 a cup

Selling for nearly $1,000 a cup, a cafe in Dubai is offering the world's most expensive coffee, brewed from Panamanian beans sold at a premium price.

The wealthy emirate is known for its extravagant ventures, including an enormous mall with an indoor ski area, the world's tallest building and an artificial island dotted with five-star hotels.

"The wait is finally over," Serkan Sagsoz, co-founder of the Julith cafe with the pricey offering, said in a Facebook video. "The world's most celebrated and highest graded coffee of all time has arrived at Julith."

Located in an industrial neighborhood that has become a hotspot for coffee lovers, Julith plans to serve "around 400 cups" of the precious beverage starting on Saturday, Sagsoz told AFP.

"We felt Dubai was the perfect place for our investment," Sagsoz said.

For a price tag of 3,600 dirhams (around $980), the brew offers an experience of floral and fruity flavors reminiscent of tea.

"There are white floral notes like jasmine, citrus flavors like orange and bergamot and a hint of apricot and peach," said Sagsoz, who previously ran a cafe in his native Turkey.

"It's like honey, delicate and sweet," he said.

Dubai notched a Guinness World Record for the world's most expensive cup of coffee last month, when Roasters offered one for 2,500 dirhams.

The new record staggered some people, though residents also said it was par for the course for the desert city with a luxury lifestyle.

"It's very shocking but at the same time, it's Dubai," said Ines, who did not give her last name.

"For wealthy people, it's just another experience they can boast about," added another resident, Maeva.

The Julith cafe bought its beans at an auction in Panama after a tough battle that lasted many hours and drew hundreds of bids.

It claimed to have paid the highest price ever for coffee.

Twenty kilograms of the beans went for around 2.2 million dirhams, or $600,000, Julith said in a press release.

Asian buyers, Emirati coffee enthusiasts and coffee bean collectors have since reached out to the cafe in the hopes of securing some of the "Nido 7 Geisha" beans, which are grown on a plantation near Panama's Baru volcano.

But the cafe said it does not plan to share its treasure, beyond a small amount reserved for Dubai's ruling family.

The pricey cup of coffee is being offered as the cost of roasted coffee has jumped 18.9% in the U.S., according to the most recent Consumer Price Index data for September.

The average retail price of 100% ground roast coffee reached a record high of $9.14 per pound in September, labor data shows. That's well over double the price from December 2019, when a pound of ground coffee cost just over $4.

Several factors are driving this increase. First, volatile weather, including both heavy rain and droughts in major coffee-producing countries, such as Brazil and Colombia, is depressing crop yields, Phil Lempert, food industry analyst and editor of SupermarketGuru, told CBS News.

Lempert also said American tariffs on foreign imports are having an impact on domestic coffee prices. As of 2023, the U.S. imported about 80% its unroasted beans from Latin America, according to the USDA, with Hawaii and Puerto Rico the only U.S. states or territories that produce much coffee.

The Trump administration this year has imposed new tariffs on several major coffee producers that export to the U.S. That includes a 50% levy on Brazil, which has led producers there to withhold shipments as they negotiate with American roasters over who will absorb the added costs, according to investment bank UBS.

In a September report, the International Coffee Organization cited uncertainty around coffee tariffs as one catalyst impacting supply in the U.S. Coffee "cannot be produced in the U.S. on a large enough scale to meet domestic demand," the trade group noted.