Why a £40 latte could one day become a regular reality: The creative, exclusive future of coffee culture

Get a firm grip on your lattes: The price of a cup of coffee could reach £40.

“Yes, people are willing to pay that for a coffee now,” says Peter Dore-Smith, of Fitzrovia’s Kaffeine, which he founded back in 2009, making him one of the pioneers in London’s independent coffee scene.

“Of course, a price like that is down to the coffee and the expertise and time of the barista who has to make the drink. It’s not like a sommelier recommending a great wine and then just opening the bottle. But demand for such extra-special drinks is also a testament to how interest in coffee — its origins, its flavours — just keeps growing”.

That’s not to say more accessible prices won’t still be around: the industry is constantly flirting with the £5 latte, a psychological barrier for many drinkers but perhaps a coming necessity given the growing coffee cultures of the global south, where coffee has historically been grown and sold at suppressed prices to the global north. Yes, like any commodity, the price of coffee is in no small part a matter of geo-politics.

More so, it’s suggestive of how the retail landscape for the black stuff was pretty much non-existent 20 years ago — “back then most people had no idea what a flat white was,” notes Dore-Smith — but now encompasses an estimated 12,000 independent coffee shops across the US. People, says Dore-Smith, want more of an experience from their coffee, both in terms of the drink and the environment in which it’s served, than ever before. No wonder more specialty shops are rotating their coffee menus, offering specials and even coffee classes.

Peak coffee

But might we be at peak coffee? It depends where you are, suggests Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood, founder of Leather Lane’s Colonna Coffee, three time winner of the UK Barista Championships and author of The Business of Specialty Coffee and the forthcoming Coffee Lovers’ Guide. Coffee shops compete not by area but by street, so while some streets are seeing the business seemingly eat itself (unless the shops can stand apart by being distinctly speciality in their own way) others remain under-served. It’s like those weird clusters of Turkish barbers, or vape shops.

Still, Dore-Smith expects some contraction, especially among the big chain brands. But, in no small part down to the increased access to knowledge made possible by YouTube aficionados, he also expects a second wave of coffee appreciation. Of the 600 of so coffees he makes a day, more than 10% of them are now filter or cold brew. That may not sound like a lot, but it perhaps marks the beginning of a trend for appreciating coffee as an ingredient in its own right, focused around origin and flavour, and maybe not so much drowned in milk.

“Milk and sugar — all the drinks formats that are heavy on both — have in some sense detracted from appreciating the most important ingredient: the coffee, the quality of which has counted for less as a result. Milk got in the way,” says Colonna-Dashwood. As have, he concedes, some of the industry’s own obsessions: a ‘good’ crema, for example, meaning the velvety foam on top of a fresh espresso.

“Crema was popular because it looked pretty and suggested an intense espresso, which encouraged people to connect it with quality,” he says.

“But it doesn’t actually taste very good and acknowledging that is a sign of how the coffee industry is moving away from being prescriptive to being more culinary”.

Coffee's creative future — and a replacement for pubs?

None of this is to say the latte is over (it’s still the UK’s most popular coffee drink) even if Colonna-Dashwood thinks the oat milk boom is. More that, “as with all fields that we like to label as a bit snooty because they’re complicated, interest in coffee is growing precisely because it’s a subject you can get your teeth into."

Certainly coffee isn’t just coffee any more. Expect more experimentation. Coffee might be made from a dose that’s been kept frozen, for example, for added freshness. Meanwhile, former World Espresso Champion, Ian Kissick, of Victoria’s Formative, for instance, has developed a Fizzy Apple coffee using a co-fermentation technique, repurposed from beer brewing, with green apples added to the mix. Kissick has also come up with Parma Violet and Lollipop-influenced coffees.

OK, so Colonna-Dashwood might not have much time for ‘flavour notes’ (“they’re rubbish,” he offers) but undoubtedly coffees are being appreciated for their very particular aromas and tastes. Cognac, anyone, or tropical fruit?

And these, in turn, are being foregrounded thanks to an ever-shorter gap between coffee farmer and consumer. With greater transparency to the coffee production chain, farmers are more able to play an active part in shaping the coffees being produced.

“People are even starting to know the names of coffee farms now,” Colonna-Dashwood adds.

“But there’s no way round it: as with wine or cheese, to appreciate ‘gourmet’ coffee now you have to put the time in. The fact is that there’s still a huge mass of customers who are only just now catching up with the idea of coffee being gourmet, and that will take several years yet to filter through. Chocolate is even further behind coffee.”

In the meantime, record prices are being achieved for all kinds of rare coffee micro-lots: if a typically average coffee wholesales for anywhere between £9 and £40 per kilo, £8,000 per kilo isn’t unheard of these days; last year a rare lot from the legendary Panamanian estate Hacienda La Esmeralda was bought by one cafe in Dubai for a record-setting £22,804 per kilo. “Every year the numbers just go up,” says Colonna-Dashwood.

These though, are outliers - and shouldn’t encourage you to feel too resentful at paying what seems to be an ever rising price for a coffee, even if we’re some way off the £7 — “what you’d pay for a nice pint in a nice pub,” as Colonna-Dashwood puts it — that he suggests as being the tipping point that would give many coffee drinkers pause for thought. That’s especially so with technology, with subscription models for unusual blends, allowing for ever better coffees to be made easily at home.

Most drinkers are not aware that it’s still remarkably hard to make any money from a coffee shop while people aren’t much minded yet to cross that £5 latte hurdle. It’s a volume business: You have to sell a lot of coffees to make a decent profit but, to drive sales, that requires keeping cup prices artificially low relative to the cost of production.

But then, Dore-Smith argues, a coffee isn’t really about a coffee anymore anyway. Even as they get more high-end and curated, coffee shops are increasingly about filling the role of community hubs once served by pubs, and especially as younger generations are shunning alcohol in greater numbers.

“The coffee shop is an integral part of any high street now,” he suggests. “It’s a place for people to gather. But we still need to give people reasons to go to coffee shops, no matter how good or interesting the coffee itself may be”.

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