Wake up with a $10 cup o' joe

What's the difference between your average cup of joe and one that sells for $10 per French press pot?

The pricey one still tastes great when it's tepid.

Unfortunately, the woman who grew the coffee, Aida Batlle of El Salvador, didn't get to experience that taste as robustly as she would have liked. In Apex last week to talk about her coffee at Pheasant Creek Coffee, Batlle was so eager to try her new Grand Reserve that she drank it while it was scalding hot.

"I burned my tongue," the thin, dark-haired entrepreneur said with a look of chagrin.

With the help of coffee roaster Peter Giuliano, owner of Counter Culture Coffee in Durham, and Geoff Corey, owner of Pheasant Creek, she was in town to give a presentation on how her coffee is grown and why it costs $60 per pound of roasted beans.

"You've got the entire supply chain right here," Corey pointed out. (Aida's Grand Reserve is also available directly from Counter Culture for $45 for 12 ounces and from 3Cups in Chapel Hill for $57 per pound and $8 for a single French press cup. Both coffeeshops will also sell the beans in 1/4-pound increments.)

That exclusivity is a big part of the priciness. Counter Culture is the only roaster for Batlle's Finca Mauritania, coffee grown on one of her three farms on the side of the Ilamatepec volcano in Santa Ana. Coffee from her other farms also goes to individual roasters, one in Norway and one in Japan.

The Ilamatepec volcano is another part of the equation, accounting for the unique microclimate that is ideal for growing coffee.

"A volcano is one of the few places in the world where you get that [rich] soil and that altitude that are just perfect for coffee," Giuliano said. But when that volcano erupted last year, it also cut back on production a bit, decreasing Batlle's supply.

Grand Reserve has all the right adjectives in its description: organic, shade-grown, fair trade. It's hand-picked and hand-sorted, adding extra labor costs.

But the main reason Grand Reserve costs more is the shape of the beans. While most coffee beans are flat-sided halves, these are peaberries -- rounded beans that curl in. Peaberries used to be rejected as a deformity, but once it was discovered that they actually produce coffee with more intense flavor than flat beans, these ugly ducklings became the coffee world's beautiful swans.

"Less than 5 percent of coffee beans are peaberries," Giuliano said. On promotional copy for the Grand Reserve, he calls the result "transcendent," with a fragrance of butterscotch and caramel and flavors of cherry, melon, dark chocolate, fig, spice, cedar, pepper and brown sugar.

Because of the rarity of the peaberries, only 500 pounds of Grand Reserve -- peaberries from Batlle's three farms -- were harvested.

"Once you understand what really goes into it, $60 per pound doesn't seem so outrageous anymore," Giuliano said.

In the end, Corey said, you can't really compare a coffee like Grand Reserve to a cup of regular joe. It's more like a great bottle of wine.

"You can spend $100 on a bottle of wine and that will only last you two hours," Corey said.

Coffee lasts longer -- and you'll be wide awake to enjoy it.