Bismarck Coffee Is About To Get Spendy

I like a good strong cup of coffee as much as anyone.  The thing is I also dislike flavored coffee maybe more than anyone. I'd be in way over my head in any further discussion of a cappuccino, espresso, frappucino, or latte.

I don't even like whipped cream on my cocoa...don't put dopey milk heart designs in my coffee

I also like tea, but that's also been getting complicated to order.

I'm amazed every time I drive by certain coffee joints.  It can be 2 PM on a Tuesday afternoon and the line goes around the building and out onto the street.  It was sooo many years ago, yet I still remember my first corporate coffee experience standing behind a mother-daughter duo ordering ahead of me.  They each got a cup of "coffee" and what looked like a dried bread crust and the clerk told them it would be just about $20.00 which they paid and merrily went on their way.  Me, I got a small "house blend" paid them probably two bucks, and merrily went on my own way.  I later discovered the dried bread-looking thing was called a "biscotti"...meh.

If it makes you happy by all means keep staying happy.

I'm predicting I'll be in a similar line just down the street when the new Chik-fil-A opens.  So this is a judgment-free zone.  But I did want to give all of us coffee lovers a heads up that prices are almost certainly on the way up.  Potentially way-way up.  Just reading this, you can almost hear the quivering in this coffee guy's voice.

 “This is unprecedented,” said Alexis Rubinstein, the managing editor of Coffee & Cocoa for commodities brokerage StoneX Group. “It’s never been this perfect storm before. It’s usually just been a supply-and-demand scenario.

“We’ve never been dealing with a supply-and-demand issue on top of a logistics issue, on top of labor issues, on top of a global pandemic.”

Yipes!

Seems the coffee supply is getting a real kick in the trousers from a sustained drought in Brazil followed by two July hard frosts. Instead of just making the "Brazilian Hard Frost" their new iced coffee offering, they decided to damn near double the price per pound for coffee! That kind of coffee is the Arabica bean, and it went from a buck a pound up to nearly two dollars per pound.  But the fun is far from done.

The big question is how this affects future production. Coffee trees can take up to five years to mature, so it will take a few seasons before the scale of the damage is clear. If, as some respected reporters are suggesting, the frost causes maximum damage – potentially hitting two-thirds of trees – there may be a long-lasting drop in world supplies. This could see prices breaking through the US$3.00 and even US$4.00 barrier.

Like putting away money for your kid's college education, I might suggest you start a coffee fund of some sort so you don't find yourself stealing catalytic converters for caffeine.