- What the grower is paid Farmgate / internal COP 2,245,000 What a Colombian farmer actually gets — for parchment, the papery-husked bean before milling, not green coffee. Converting it to dollars per pound depends on the mill’s yield factor and the cup result, so we show the real number instead of a guess. Colombia’s posted internal price, 7 August 2026
- What an importer pays at origin FOB no figure held The price of coffee loaded on a ship at origin — where the exporter’s margin and the quality premium land. Negotiated privately per contract, so anyone quoting a single FOB price for a whole country is estimating. The first price most green buyers actually see
- The commodity benchmark C market + differential $3.08/lb What the news means by “coffee prices”: a futures contract for washed arabica of no particular origin, not a coffee anyone drinks. ICE Coffee C close, 4 August 2026
- A bag on a US supermarket shelf Roasted retail $9.46/lb Roasted weight, which is the catch — roasting burns off close to a fifth of the bean’s mass before shipping and margin are added. BLS US city average, June 2026 (series APU0000717311)
- Honduras Cup of Excellence, winning lot Competition auction $28.40/lb Nine times the benchmark — and it is a Parainema, the rust-resistant type the specialty trade spent years writing off. 2026 auction, natural Parainema, 89.14 points
- Costa Rica Cup of Excellence, top lot Competition auction $200.10/lb The other twenty-nine winners in the same auction averaged $45.53, so “a Cup of Excellence coffee” says far less about price than people assume. 2026, washed Java, 91.36 points, Finca Río Blanco
- Dubai specialty auction, top lot Competition auction $4,546.00/lb The far tail — a few hundred pounds of one named lot, telling you nothing about what any other coffee costs. DMCC, inaugural edition
From the commodity benchmark to the Dubai auction lot that is a spread of about 1,476×, and the two prices that matter most to a grower do not fit on the chart at all. So when someone tells you what coffee costs, the useful question is always which price, and on what day.
Start here
If you have ever wondered why one bag of Colombian costs $12 and another costs $60, what “Supremo” or “AA” on a label actually promises, or whether the Gesha you paid for is really Gesha — this is the reference. Every origin and variety here says where the figure came from and when it was last checked, so you can go and look for yourself.
Six things almost everyone gets wrong about coffee
You will have read all six of these on roaster websites, in shop copy and in coffee guides. Each one is wrong, and the document that proves it is public.
Supremo is a better grade than Excelso
They are not parallel grades. Excelso is Colombia’s export standard, and Supremo is one of several PREPARATIONS inside it, separated by screen size, alongside UGQ, Caracol, Europa, Extra, Premium and Maragogipe. The near-universal retail phrasing describes a ladder the standard does not have.
Pink Bourbon is a Bourbon
It is Ethiopian landrace material, in the same group as Chiroso and Sidra, and unrelated to Bourbon or Typica despite the name. Genetic testing of five lots sold as Pink Bourbon found two mixed with Bourbon, two with Catimor and one pure — so the name fails twice: wrong lineage, and unverified in the bag.
Castillo is a variety
Castillo is a composite of many released lines: a general release of around 35, plus regional releases and three zonal ones. Cenicafé states plainly that composite varieties are not phenotypically uniform. One row labelled “Castillo” collapses a dozen distinct releases into a single claim.
A country has a harvest season
Harvest is per region, per altitude band, per crop, and it moves year to year with the weather. Within one Colombian department the low farms can finish before the high farms start, and the “secondary” mitaca is the principal harvest in several departments. At least one widely used harvest calendar has Colombia’s two crops inverted.
An 88-point coffee beats an 87-point coffee
Only if both were scored on the same form. Three regimes are live at once: the SCA 2004 form, the SCA Coffee Value Assessment adopted in November 2024 which superseded it, and Cup of Excellence’s own form, which was never the SCA form. Plus private house variants. The number is not the measurement; the number and the protocol together are.
This is what coffee costs
Five different transactions are all called “the price”, and they differ by three orders of magnitude on the same day. A farmgate figure, a C-market quote, an FOB, an auction result and a shelf price are not comparable, and converting between them without the published factors invents a number rather than deriving one.
Where coffee comes from
What grows where, at what altitude, when it is picked, and how each country actually grades what it exports — so you can tell what a label is promising you before you pay for it. Where nobody publishes a figure, we say so rather than guess.
| Origin | Altitude | Main harvest | Export standard | Price quoted as | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | 700 m – 1,350 m | May to September | Type 2-8 by defect count, plus screen size and a separate cup term | C market | Secondary |
| Colombia | 1,200 m – 2,000 m | September to December in most of the country | Excelso | Farmgate COP per 125 kg carga | Primary |
| Costa Rica | 1,200 m – 1,950 m | November to March | SHB / HB by altitude | Auction USD per pound | Secondary |
| Ethiopia | 1,500 m – 2,300 m | October to January, varying by zone | ECX grades 1-9, plus specialty channels | Auction | Secondary |
| Guatemala | 1,300 m – 2,000 m | December to April | SHB / HB / EPW and below, by altitude | not published | Secondary |
| Honduras | 1,000 m – 1,700 m | November to April | SHG / HG by altitude | Auction USD per pound | Secondary |
| Kenya | 1,400 m – 2,100 m | October to December (main crop) | AA, AB, PB, C, E, TT, T by screen size | Auction USD per 50 kg bag | Secondary |
| Yemen | 1,500 m – 2,400 m | October to December | — | not published | Secondary |
| Boquete, Panama region | 1,200 m – 1,900 m | December to March | — | Auction USD per pound | Secondary |
| Sumatra, Indonesia region | 900 m – 1,600 m | October to March in Aceh and North Sumatra | Grade 1-6 by defect count | not published | Secondary |
The varieties on the bag
Gesha, Bourbon, Typica, Castillo, SL28 and the rest: what each name really refers to, how the plant behaves, what it tastes like at altitude — and how often anyone has checked that the coffee in the bag matches the name on it.
| Variety | What the name refers to | Verification | Lineage | Leaf rust | Cup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bourbon also sold as Yellow Bourbon, Red Bourbon, Orange Bourbon | Named cultivar | Declared only | Bourbon-Typica group | Susceptible | Excellent |
| Castillo | Composite release | Declared only | Introgressed (Caturra x Timor Hybrid line) | Resistant | Good |
| Caturra | Named cultivar | Declared only | Bourbon-Typica group | Susceptible | Very good |
| Gesha also sold as Geisha | Landrace group | Declared only | Ethiopian landrace, collected in the Gesha region | Susceptible | Exceptional at high altitude |
| Maragogipe also sold as Elephant bean, Maragogype | Named cultivar | Declared only | Bourbon-Typica group | Susceptible | Fair to very good, and highly variable |
| Parainema | Named cultivar | Declared only | Introgressed (Sarchimor) | Resistant | Very good, and demonstrably better than the category reputation |
| Pink Bourbon also sold as Borbon Rosado | Contested lineage | Tested, found mixed | Ethiopian landrace (Core Ethiopia group) | — | Exceptional at altitude |
| SL28 | Contested lineage | Declared only | Contested. Story says Bourbon; genetic work suggests closer to Typica. | Susceptible | Exceptional at high altitude |
| SL34 | Contested lineage | Declared only | Contested. Recorded as French Mission Bourbon; genetic work suggests closer to Typica. | Susceptible | Very good |
| Timor Hybrid also sold as Hibrido de Timor, HdT, Tim Tim | Named cultivar | Declared only | Interspecific (Arabica x Canephora) | Resistant | Poor to fair as itself; grown almost entirely as a breeding parent |
| Typica also sold as Criollo, Arabigo | Named cultivar | Declared only | Bourbon-Typica group | Susceptible | Very good |
How to read anything on this site
Six habits that will make you harder to mislead about coffee, here or anywhere else. The longer version — including all five prices above and the three cupping forms in use right now — is on how we record a figure.
Ask which price
A coffee price means nothing until you know where in the chain it was taken, what unit it is in, and whether it is for cherry, parchment, green or roasted. Every price here says all three.
Ask which scoring form
An 88 is only better than an 87 if both were cupped on the same form, and three are in use right now. We give you the score and the form together, and never rank across them.
A variety name is a claim
Almost no coffee sold anywhere has been genetically tested, so the variety on the label is what somebody wrote down. Where a lot has been tested we say so — and testing regularly disagrees with the label.
Grades are not a league table
Supremo is not above Excelso and AA is not a quality score — most export grades sort by bean size, and they sit inside each other rather than above each other. We show the shape each standard really has.
Harvest moves every year
No country has one harvest. It runs by region, by altitude and by crop, and it shifts with the weather — which is why a bag’s freshness depends on where in the country it grew, not just the year.
A blank means nobody published it
When you see an empty field here, it means no source worth citing has published that figure — not that we skipped it. We never fill one in from a neighbouring region or a similar-sounding variety.