A cup of coffee that can run more than $200 is making its way across the country this week, starting with stops in Los Angeles and San Francisco, after a Brooklyn roaster paid $44,275 for seven kilograms of one of Panama's rarest Gesha lots. The roaster, SEY, is based in Bushwick and plans to sell the beans by the gram while building an entire tasting tour around the single, staggeringly expensive harvest.
The coffee comes from Finca Sophia in Panama and is the number-one lot from the farm's 2026 private auction, according to Time Out, which first reported on the release. SEY purchased the lot at auction for $44,275, working out to $6,325 per kilogram, and a single cup can contain more than $200 worth of coffee. The beans were grown as high as 2,200 meters in Panama's cloud forests, making it Finca Sophia's highest-elevation lot, per the outlet's reporting.
A Wine-Cellar Approach to Coffee Tasting
SEY is introducing the coffee as part of its SEY World Coffee Tour, a series of tastings designed to feel less like a coffee shop visit and more like a wine cellar experience comparing variety, geography, processing and producer. The tour begins in Los Angeles on October 17 and continues in San Francisco on October 18, before eventually traveling to London, Paris, Shanghai, Seoul and other cities, the outlet's report notes. Each tasting features six coffees, including the Finca Sophia Gesha alongside five other rare selections from producers in Panama, Ethiopia and Ecuador.
Tickets for the core tasting experience, billed as the In Good Company sessions, run $250 per person and can be booked through Tock. The sessions give attendees a guided walk through all six coffees in the lineup, including the headline Gesha lot. The Finca Sophia coffee is floral, with ripe tropical fruit—qualities associated with the Gesha varietal's reputation for intense floral aromas, acidity and sweetness.
Who's Pouring the Rare Lot
Lance Hedrick, SEY's director of research and education, will lead the first California tastings.
Beyond the ticketed tastings, SEY will sell the coffee by the gram through its website and brew it at its Bushwick café.
Why Panama's Gesha Commands These Prices
The extreme pricing traces back to geography as much as flavor. High elevation and cooler temperatures at Finca Sophia slow the ripening of coffee cherries, a process widely credited with concentrating the complex flavors prized in top-tier Gesha lots. Finca Sophia was founded in 2008 near Nueva Suiza, Panama. The farm sits at an elevation of 2,026 meters and took first place in the Best of Panama competition in 2016.
Panama accounts for only about 0.1% of global coffee production by volume. That scarcity has pushed auction prices into territory that would have seemed absurd a generation ago.
The Finca Sophia coffee is a fully washed single-origin lot. Whether $200 cups and $250 tasting tickets find a steady audience beyond novelty-seekers remains to be seen, but for now, SEY is betting that curiosity about Panama's rarest harvests will travel as far as London, Paris, Shanghai and Seoul.
