Thursday, January 24 2008
The $20,000 Cup of Coffee
For twenty grand I want 3 sugars and four creams
I will be the first to admit that I have occasionally indulged in excess in my personal life. I once paid $200 for two two-ounce glasses of wine. I own some wineglasses that cost a day's pay–each. I've eaten my own weight in foie gras. Heck, I even paid fifteen bucks for a single cup of coffee, once. But there comes a point where the spirit of adventure, the desire for novelty and the idealism of a sensualist run flat into a big ol' case of the stupids. Viz, the $20,000 coffee maker.
Okay, the concept and the physics are good. By controlling the grind, the water temperature and the flow rate through the separator with great precision, one can make a transcendentally good cup of coffee. Polyphenols (the tannin-y compounds in coffee that provide a lot of the mouthfeel and astringency) can be folded almost into a souffle of complex organic compounds, giving great substance and delicacy to the brew.
Of course, you can accomplish that with a kettle, a candy thermometer and a thirty dollar Yama vacuum pot.
My mad scientist pal (the one who owns a couple of nuclear reactors and drives a 900 hp race car as his commuting vehicle of choice) sneered when shown the picture of the $20K coffee spoofer. The most interesting thing about it is the halogen heating elements because of the low level thermal hysteresis they generate. You could build the whole thing in two afternoons for about $500 bucks, all-in.
So why are they hyping the stupendous and (in my opinion) bone-stupid price? Because of the recent proof offered that people actually record higher levels of activity in the pleasure centres of their brain when they think a consumer good is more expensive than it is. By telling people they're getting coffee from a machine that costs as much as a sedan, they drive up the perceived value, right on a neurochemical level.
Me, I sell kits that let people make very good wine, very inexpensively, even when they buy our most expensive products. And that works fine for me.
Hey, maybe we should display a picture of our new HTST Pastuerizer here--those things are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and people would like their wine better!
Meh, on second thought I think I'll go make myself a cup of coffee, with my own, superior-technology setup.
Ahh.
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