Coffee market fires up as brew becomes liquid gold

ST. LOUIS • Tim Drescher changes around the front of your coffee roaster, looking strangely like a dancer.
Leaning to the left, which reads out a laminated sheet that lists tips temperatures and times. Move to the right, which plays with levers to adjust the heat and airflow. Over the next 10 minutes, it moves forward and backward while a batch of Peruvian beans change from pale green to deep chocolate brown inside the roasting drum.
"It's a combination of art and science," said Drescher as an indicator of the eyeballs. "You're trying to make the best of the bean."
And beans are a smoking hot item these days, so there is little room for a barbecue wrong.
The price of coffee has almost doubled in the last year, a maximum of 14 years, forcing companies to raise coffee prices and consumers pay more for their everyday Joe. Poor harvests in the coffee growing regions, along with high demand, have shaken up prices, putting pressure on businesses large coffee the way down to small batch artisan roaster, as Drescher.
"More beans order, the price has gone up, up, up," he says.
Your Kuva Coffee Co., on the edge of the area of Hill, Drescher is what you call a micro-roaster, one of at least five smaller coffee companies scale have emerged in the St. Louis area in the last decade. With the rise of specialty coffee, the city has become a center of caffeine, with small roasters join large companies - Ronnoco, Chauvin and Thomas - who have made their home in St. Louis for decades.
Regardless of size or age, however, these companies are dealing with the same challenges - and they're having to raise prices. On Friday, Starbucks said it would raise the retail prices of packaged coffee and suggested that the stores charge an extra dollar.
"We did a price increase, and we are watching," said Tyler Zimmer, the buyer Kaldi Coffee, which launched in 1994. "Many of the industrial roasters - Folgers, Maxwell House -. They have made three or four of the 10 percent price increase"
For the new kids on the block of San Luis coffee, price increases are the first to be faced in its young history. And that is what a battlefield and more nervous.
"I know that there are cities like this, where this great competition," said Drescher.
ABOUT THE BEAN
companies buy their coffee beans from equatorial regions of growth in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Africa. companies with high-end coffee arabica beans, mostly from the Americas, while the commercial grade coffees are typically made from robusta beans, which are easier to grow and less appreciated.
The green beans are purchased, then sent to companies to convince out certain qualities in the roasting process remain near according to the formulas of the house.
Within Ronnoco facilities along Highway 40, pallets of grain around the world are stacked 20 feet high. Bags, the beans are inspected and cleaned before being introduced into containers. A computer program plots the grain of container, falling in three gas giant toasters.
"The formulas are in a database contained in a office," said President Frank Ronnoco Guyol, walking around the area of production.
Ronnoco has been in business for over a century and has weathered the ups and downs of the market. But in recent years the company has seen a change.
"There has been significant market changes in recent years," said Guyol. "But this kind of volatility."
The points of the coffee industry to a number of drivers, including the speculators who have entered the coffee market, sending prices higher.
"Those of us who have lived and breathed the coffee industry, we have not seen anything like this," said Robert Carpenter, Ronnoco coffee buyer. "You have 10 -. A 20-cent swings in a day without fundamental news is very frustrating, but it keeps things interesting."
The weather also proved to be an important factor. home coffee machines, Colombia, has suffered three years of poor harvests heat Arabica, sending yields below 12 million bags of 132 pounds in 2006 to 9 million in 2010.
At the same time, demand for Arabica have increased along with the appetite of high quality coffee in the newly developing countries, especially China.
"The demand for coffee is so high," said Christopher Ruess, owner of Mississippi Mud coffee, another small-scale roaster based in St. Louis. "China is buying out entire regions. So is Starbucks."
SUPPLY DEMAND
Much of the demand is, in fact, has been promoted by Starbucks, which has helped create a culture of high-end coffee in the United States, which had previously existed mostly in the cafes of Paris, Vienna and Rome. The Starbucks effect has led to more roasters in more cities around the country, even here.
"St. Louis is becoming a center of real coffee," said Rainer Bussmann, director of the William L. Brown at the Missouri Botanical Garden. "The coffee is good for a long time over a European thing."
Bussmann, a conservationist and ethno-botanist who travels extensively in Latin and South America, said the illegal drug trade has also had an impact on coffee prices.
"Because drug prices have risen, and is therefore a more stable income, people have begun to uproot (coffee), and of course affects the world market because there are fewer good coffee," said Bussmann.
High prices have coffee roasters seeking new grain-growing regions cheaper. Verner Earls, the coffee buyer for Chauvin, says the company is looking for the least-known coffee growing in Africa, including Burundi and Rwanda.
"Is there anything else out there that is so good, but half the price? "Earls said." It's a perfect opportunity to get your product out there. "
With prices so high, is likely to plant more coffee producers, which means more supply and a fall in prices over time. But meanwhile, roasters are paying more for grain - and so will dogs coffee.
"For the latest toasters, this is a record," said Ruess. "But ultimately, it is not so bad. It just depends on what their margins are."
The good news for coffee companies is that coffee drinkers tend to pay what the market dictates.
"With some things that stroke when the price goes up a few cents," said Michael Sansol, food industry analyst based in Chicago. "But what seems to happen with coffee, for the few pleasures they have in their life, they will pay the price."
coffee drinkers tend to upscale lower their standards, but may end up changing their habits, perhaps by buying and brewing at home more.
"It just depends on how high prices go," said Drescher. "But once you've been drinking the good, not going to switch to Folgers."
Coffee prices, analysts say, are actually quite low - in fact, cheaper, when adjusted for inflation, in 1970.
"The coffee cherries on the trees for eight, nine months. They are gathered by hand, aggregates, post, roasted, packaged, low time and prepared," said Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Association of Specialty Coffee Growers of America . "A huge amount of coffee touching hands, and remains extremely cheap."