The $18 cup of coffee
High-tech cafe breaks brews’ barriers
The caffeine in this cup of coffee isn’t the only thing that will wake you up — the price will, too.
Extraction Lab, a java joint in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, that opened last Friday, will be serving the country’s most expensive cup of coffee, at $18.
Meanwhile, Annie Gaarder, a 30-year-old actress who was on her lunch break, sampled a slightly less expensive brew and called it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“I would probably rather have a meal, but it was delicious,” she said. “Next time, I’ll get a lower-priced coffee. This was the life experience for me.”
She usually adds cream, but skipped it because she “didn’t want to ruin it.”
The shop’s $14.75 cup, the “Jeremy Zhang Gesha,” is made from a rare Ethiopian Arabica bean and, like all the shop’s java servings, brewed in a $7,000 coffeemaker called the Steampunk.
The beans are a special variety of the high-end Arabica Gesha strain, which is grown at high altitude at an Extraction Lab-operated farm in Panama run by the coffee’s namesake, Jeremy Zhang, an award-win- ning Chinese coffee expert.
The shop says it will soon be selling an $18 cup, featuring an even higher-grade variety of the bean. Brooklyn is already buzzing. “This is so cool and dope. I wouldn’t be opposed to buying an $18 cup of coffee. It’s like craft beer, but it’s the craft beer of the coffee world,” said Claire Andrews, 26, who works near the 35th Street shop.
Instead, Andrews opted for a $3 Finca Santa Rosa — the cheapest coffee on the menu.
Alexa Peretz, a 26-year-old actress who got an herbal tea for $4.75, said, “I wouldn’t spend $18 on a cup unless it’s a one-time thing.”
The shop’s specially designed Steampunk coffee and tea maker, which is created by Alpha Dominche, brews the coffee in a sequence of glass chambers. It can control temperatures, the amount of water added, and brew time.
Alpha Dominche CEO Thomas Perez said his goal with Extraction Lab wasn’t to create the country’s most expensive coffee, a title held until now by Equator, a California shop that sold a $15 cup of coffee.
“We don’t want customers to be intimidated when they walk in,” Perez said. “We want to create an open community.”