Would you pay $20 for a coffee? The hipster café selling a VERY expensive Ethiopian brew – and they insist it puts a flat white to shame
An upmarket café is selling an Ethiopian coffee flavoured with strawberries and hints of Earl Grey tea for $20 - and they say it much better than any flat white.
Single O in the trendy inner-city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills started taking orders for the highly-regarded ground coffee Rumudamo #2 last week.
The brew came in second in the Cup of Excellence competition - known as 'the Oscars of coffee' - in Ethiopia earlier this year.
Restaurant Three Blue Ducks in Bronte in the city's eastern suburbs sold out of the blend just hours after they put their limited stock of Rumudamo on offer.
Trendy Sydney café Single O is selling the highly-touted Rumudamo #2 coffee for $20 a cup
Single O is only offering the specialty coffee to its customers for three weeks and said the price was an indicator of the hours of work put into the beans by artisan producers.
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'Workers pick individual coffee cherries off trees and production is limited. A lot of people have worked very hard to get that coffee in a cup,' the café's head of coffee Wendy de Jong told Good Food.
'People don't blink twice when a glass of wine costs $20, so why should sustainable, small-batch coffee be any different?'
Single O is also selling a 125g packet of the coffee for $75, describing the product on its Instagram page as 'totally splurge-worthy'.
Ms de Jong said workers individually picked coffee cherries off trees to make Rumudamo.
Cafe manager Dan Winch said the blend offered hot brew aficionados an alternative from the sharp, intense flavours of an espresso.
'You can barely compare it to a latte or other milk-based coffee,' he said.
Single O - based in Surry Hills in Sydney's inner-city is only offering the artisan coffee to its customers for three weeks
Pictured: Baristas at Single O in the Sydney CBD. Workers individually picked coffee cherries off trees to make the specialty Rumudamo brew, the café's head of coffee Wendy de Jong said
In 2017, a blend called Esmeralda Geisha Canas Verdes Natural was bought at auction by a Sydney coffee business for $601 per pound.
The buyer teamed up with a coffee roaster to host a tasting of the brew – called the 601 Experience – at a store in Manly Vale on Sydney's northern beaches.
Tickets for the event were priced at $55 for two people.