Why are some local cups of coffee just under $2 and some as much as $24? This week I explore cost, worth and value.

At Andy’s Diner on Massachusetts Avenue north of Porter, the coffee flows freely and your cup – at $3.75 – is refillable (the menu says “one refill,” but in my experience, you are refilled as long as you are there). It’s made several times a morning, depending on the number of quaffing customers.

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Cambridge has at least one wildly expensive coffee that reminds me of other moments people served very pricey versions. If you go to one of George Howell’s cafés when the fantastically fancy cup is in rotation, a single pour, made as you watch, will cost $24. In the high-spending bubble years of the 1980s in Japan, a cup topped with real gold leaf, served in an antique Limoges cup, could cost as much as $100. In Amsterdam, the kopi luwak, an Indonesian coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of a civet cat and slightly fermented in the process, is about $600 for a pound of beans and perhaps $30 per cup in a café.

Headline-making expensive coffees are just that, audacious statements of some kind of added value. Each has an economic rationale for the pricing (e.g., kopi luwak is scarce, wild-hunted and gathered in the forest), but buying a cup has only the rationale of a treat, luxury or demonstration of curiosity and profligacy. The moral economy of high-end coffee includes concern for workers’ health and safety and for environmental depredation. What makes a moral economy, perhaps, is the general recognition that there is something ethical at stake in our actions or behaviors. As I write and sip a good cup of Ethiopian coffee, some complicated thoughts arise, but that is good.

Years ago, when I was part of a small team of coffee enthusiasts aiming to improve the quality (and value) of coffees in the far northeast of Cambodia, I learned that maintaining a stand of Arabica coffee bushes demands careful irrigation; that coffee “rust” is a destructive disease; and that robusta coffee is much better suited to Southeast Asia, though it gets a lower price in the market. I learned also of the fragility of excellent coffee and how much extra care it takes to produce the “specialty coffees” that are offered in third-wave cafés. And I learned how much it costs to pay workers a living wage.

As I write, I sip a small cup of freshly brewed Rio Dulce Gesha from Colombia, a bean roasted in Durham, North Carolina, and offered as a sample from Standart Magazine, to which I subscribe. With every issue comes a sample of exceptional beans. (Yes, in addition to enjoying Andy’s refillable coffee cup, I am this kind of person.) When you get a small amount of something and it comes with flavor notes on the jar, you drink it mindfully, looking for candied lemon, white florals and papaya. And though you value the experience, you would not want to seem either a fool or a Philistine. But you also know you cannot regularly afford such beans, which are beyond most specialty coffees.

Specialty coffee always has a higher price, a cachet it gained when Peet’s, then Starbucks, advertised coffees by origin on their café screens. But “origin” has been with us longer; remember Juan Valdez (played by the actor Carlos Sanchez) for the Colombian coffee syndicate? He added (invented) authenticity to the (“100 percent arabica”) coffees he promoted. 

Trish Rothgeb, a coffee expert, announced in 2003 the third wave of coffee, in which its value is commensurate with the development of its market, which includes customer education. The first wave was unconscious consumption of coffee from a can or supermarket bag and made in a Mr. Coffee and with instant coffee from jars. This was all we knew when I was growing up, until my parents got religion and started brewing in a Chemex, although we still used canned Maxwell House.

Second-wave coffee is origin conscious but not necessarily roast-level conscious and doesn’t require the third wave’s digital scale, home burr grinder or thermometer to check the cooling boiled water before pouring. Espresso has second- and third-wave iterations.

Then there is what I call 3.5 wave, “Japanese” coffee in which you check roast date and level, grind the beans as but not before the water boils, and do the spiraling pour over the grounds with a pinched spout-pouring kettle. The kodawari (dedicated pursuit of excellence) in the making of such coffees is the human element and not exclusive to Japan.

Closer to home, I reviewed prices of local coffees in cafés I’ve visited recently using a small drip cup and a small cappuccino for comparison pricing. Overall, “small” drip coffee is $2.50 to $4.75 and cappuccino $4 to $5.75. The size of the cup for a small drip or “house” coffee ranges from a rare 6 ounces at Three Little Figs to 12 ounces at many places, making 12 ounces a virtual standard and comparisons tricky.  At TLF, the “small” is $2.50 and the cappuccino, one size, is low for the area at $4. Area Four Café also has a lower-cost drip cup, at 10 ounces for $2.50 and cappuccino at $4.15. Andala has a more expensive house coffee ($3.49) and a whopping $5.75 for a cappuccino. Its special coffees, Arabic and Turkish, are $5.95 and $5.50. Intelligentsia is also on the high side, with house coffee at $4.75 and cappuccino at $5.25. In some places (Faro in Harvard Square, Hi Rise on Concord Avenue), you’re paying for the real estate, so stay a while and amortize your investment.

This week, I visited the following cafés for the pricing (and the coffee). 

Blue Bottle

I rarely patronize global chain shops, but I want to talk about Blue Bottle and my relationship with it. When James Freeman began Blue Bottle in Oakland in 2002, his interest in Japanese style and coffee was evident. I was just beginning to study coffee. When in 2013 I wrote “Coffee Life in Japan,” James helped me promote it by inviting me to speak in several Blue Bottles in and around New York. So there’s my disclosure. 

One day last week I was knocking on the door of the Harvard Square Blue Bottle, which was supposed to be open. Two sleepy staff members made us very good coffees, a pour over and an iced brew. This shop was once Café Mozart, a 1950s café where the smoke was as thick as the coffee and the sound was old Vienna. An even earlier memory: Opposite this site is the Lampoon Building where, in my high school years, my friends and I persuaded Eva Tutin, the manager of Starr Book Shop, a fusty used bookstore with Dickensian appeal, to let us open a basement coffeehouse. We set up an urn, sat on book crates and invited our friends to breathe the moldy air and sip burned coffee at no charge.

But at 7 a.m. the other day I wanted to sip fresh coffee. Blue Bottle’s clean, blonde-wood white-walled space is peaceful in the early hours. There’s not a lot of seating, but most people at that time come for takeout coffee anyway. The small pastries, from A&J King Artisan Bakers in Salem, include scones, cookies and lemon poppyseed cake (or sometimes pound cake or banana bread). Nothing extraordinary; all expensive. A small Liege waffle is $6.50, a small baguette with ham and cheese is $9.50. Cappuccino is $7, a pour-over $6. It also has iced coffees that are an homage to New Orleans coffee with chicory. Try it with vanilla chicory cold foam as a treat for $8. One note: On my receipt it said “discount for use of personal cup.” I had not thought to bring one, but you might.

Though Blue Bottle was bought first by Nestlé, it was bought recently by the Beijing-based Centurium Capital, which also owns Luckin, China’s premier coffee chain.  

George Howell, in Lovestruck Books and Café 

George Howell is known as the “dean of coffee” in our area and beyond, with a roastery in Acton and shops in Newton, Back Bay, Downtown Crossing and the romance bookstore in Harvard Square. (Lovestruck itself is interesting. Romance literature is the pulse of publishing at this moment, and while the shop’s pinkish tones might seem cloying, this is where the money is.)

George Howell famously owned Harvard Square’s Coffee Connection, much lamented when it was sold to Starbucks. Howell kept working in coffee, and his constant experimentation and experience make him a preeminent coffee expert. I live by two of his edicts: Use light-to-medium roast (the density [grams of grounds per cup] is what counts in “strength” of brew, not the darkness of the roast); and let the water sit after boiling and before pouring over the coffee to avoid scalding the grounds. Further, taste the coffee as it cools. It will reveal itself differently as the temperature falls.

Lovestruck’s George Howell has tables near bookshelves. It’s an education in a major area of contemporary publishing and merchandising. Well beyond the T-shirts and socks of some local bookstores, there are scented soaps and candles to add aroma to your reading. The food is good – a small caprese on ciabatta ($12) was satisfying and pushed us out of hunger but not to satiation. We shared a $10 Chemex-brewed Mamuto AB Kenyan coffee in two small ceramic cups. The coffee is bright but has low acidity, mellow though not particularly sweet. (You see how being in a Howell space focuses my sipping!)  

Tilde

Up Massachusetts Avenue in a cluster of restaurants near the bike path is a café that opened in December 2024. Tilde (the diacritical mark over words such as “cañon”) has a dual nature, by day a coffee shop and by early evening a wine bar. It’s a pleasant place with local art on the walls and for sale, small snacks and excellent coffee and teas. The teas are extra special – they’re from Broken Cup, a Chinese tea importer in Kendall Square. The coffees are from Broadsheet and in the medium range for local shops, with drip coffee at $3.75 and $4, and cappuccino at $5. The shop features guest coffees, at present Another Coffee, a Boston roastery.

The food and beverages change as evening approaches. The wines are domestic, made by small producers. The appetizers, salads and sandwiches appear, as do locally made pastries and desserts. Here “community” can be heard, sipped and tasted.

On a rainy Sunday, the solace of sitting with a small coffee, hearing music somewhere between French 1960s jazz and Windham Hill new age acoustic, was considerable. 

A staff member discussed the Monday morning rush, which is highly populated by regulars. In the middle of a weekday morning, I’ve seen more strollers; later in the afternoon, older customers on their way home, resting over a tea with shopping in tow. There are always people camped out to work. The staff person said that toward evening, “the laptops close down” and a more social vibe takes hold as wine is poured. I hear there is sometimes live music. If I didn’t have to run home to write this, I might have stayed to sip something even mellower than the coffee. I’ll be back.

Blue Bottle, 40 Bow St., Harvard Square, Cambridge (7 a.m. to 6 p.m.)

George Howell in Lovestruck Books and Café, 44 Brattle St., Harvard Square, Cambridge (8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday to Tuesday; 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday)

Tilde, 2376 Massachusetts Ave., North Cambridge (8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday to Tuesday; 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday to Thursday; 8 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday)

Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.

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Corky White

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