Business & Tech

Hold the Cream and Sugar With This $15 Cup of Joe

In downtown Rochester, a 'Cup of Excellence' is brewing.

There's coffee. And then there's that $15 mug of coffee they're serving up this week at in Rochester.

Yes, that's right. One mug is $15. That's pretty much 10 times the price of a standard mug of coffee at the downtown coffee shop.

It's a Cup of Excellence — literally. The beans arrived in Rochester on Thursday from a farm in San Agustin, Columbia. A farmer named Arnulfo Leguizamo grew the crop and received the award at an international coffee-tasting competition last year. The coffee is called Primavera.

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Head coffee roaster Nathan Hamood described the beans as "complex." There's a lot going on in there, he said of the brewed coffee.

Rochester Patch was in the shop Friday afternoon when barista Andrew Vickers served up the first cup of Primavera to some customers who were willing to participate in a taste test.

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Here's what the tasters had to say:

  • "It's not bitter at all," said Kevin Johnson, who admits he normally dumps cream and sugar and all kinds of flavor into his coffee to mask the bitterness.
  • "It's earthy," declared Cathy Daldin, who works next door to The Dessert Oasis at .
  • "Now that's smooth coffee," said Al Crawford, who took a break from recording a radio show to sample the coffee. Crawford said he normally drinks two cups of coffee a day.
  • "I normally add cream to my coffee, but this doesn't need it," said Cathy Guest, a coffee drinker from Rochester Hills who was out and about downtown on Friday afternoon.

For an expert opinion, we turned to barista Vickers. He compared coffee-tasting to wine-tasting: you should always look for notes in the drink, he said. "I thought it had some smokey notes and an earthy tone," Vickers said. 

He said the coffee was no stronger than your average cup of coffee — it's all about the natural flavors, he said.

The Dessert Oasis will serve the Primavera roast through Wednesday.


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