Which Coffee Tasting Notes Cost the Most?

Introduction

At BeanGenie, we crawl specialty roasters' sites and catalog their coffees: 13,000+ active products from 1,400+ roasters at last count. That's a mountain of coffee data, so we asked a simple question: are certain tasting notes more expensive? That is, do they show up on more expensive coffees?

It turns out, they do. And one of them costs nearly double the average.

Findings

This analysis was done when our database was smaller, with 1,030 price-eligible coffees from 74 roasters. After normalizing each bag's listed price to 12 ounces, we grouped the coffees by their advertised tasting notes. We excluded any note that appeared on fewer than 10 products.

The result was a surprisingly clear pattern. Coffees described with jasmine notes had an average listed price of $50.19 per 12 ounces, compared with an overall average of $27.23. That's an 84% premium!

Fruit-forward notes dominate the rest of the top 10: blueberry ($46.03), strawberry ($39.77), raspberry ($37.47), apricot ($37.45), and peach ($37.38) round out the upper tier, while citrus notes such as orange ($35.60) and tangerine ($34.59) also cluster above the average.