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Love coffee and have a couple hundred bucks lying around? (Really? No credit card bill that needs attention? No broken appliance that could use a refresh? Just extra money?!) In that case, let us introduce you to Brooklyn coffee shop SEY—named one of the Best Coffee Shops in America by Food & Wine—which is about to test that upper limit with a coffee that works out to more than $200 per cup.
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Starting October 17, the Bushwick-based roaster will release just seven kilograms of a rare Panamanian Gesha coffee from Finca Sophia, which SEY purchased at auction for a staggering $44,275. That's $6,325 per kilogram and, depending on how it's brewed, more than $200 worth of coffee in a single cup.
The coffee is the number-one lot from Finca Sophia's 2026 private auction and its highest-elevation lot, grown as high as 2,200 meters in Panama's cloud forests. Gesha is already one of the world's most prized coffee varieties, known for its intense floral aromas, acidity and sweetness. At Finca Sophia, the high elevation and cooler temperatures slow the ripening of the coffee cherries, allowing for what producers and coffee obsessives describe as greater complexity. Or, as SEY describes this particular washed Gesha: notes of bergamot, mandarin and rose petal, along with a deeper dark-fruit character.
The Brooklyn roaster is introducing the coffee as part of its SEY World Coffee Tour, a multi-continent tasting series beginning stateside October 17 in Los Angeles and October 18 in San Francisco before heading overseas to London, Paris, Shanghai, Seoul and other cities. Each tasting will feature six coffees, including the Finca Sophia Gesha and five other exceptionally rare selections from producers in Panama, Ethiopia and Ecuador.
The events are designed more like a wine-cellar experience, encouraging drinkers to compare how variety, geography, processing and producers can radically change what's in the cup. SEY's Director of Research and Education Lance Hedrick will lead the first California tastings. (Hedrick has become one of specialty coffee's most recognizable personalities, with roughly 450,000 YouTube followers.)
For SEY, the eye-watering price tag is part of the experiment. “Exploring the relationship between quality and value—and how people define and perceive both—is central to our mission at SEY,” SEY Director of Brand Strategy Doug Cohen says. “Panama is an especially interesting place to explore that question, as exceptional quality is met with staggering prices. Purchasing this coffee gives us an opportunity to ask: where do coffees like this sit in the market, and how do consumers respond to them? We are fascinated to find out.”
The coffee will also be sold by the gram through SEY's website and brewed at the Bushwick café, as well as at MOTORS in Paris and PLAY in Laguna Beach. For more information and to make a reservation for the SEY World Coffee Tour, click here.