Coffee prices giving brewers, drinkers a jolt

If caffeine is your vice get ready for a squeeze. In the last year the price of coffee at the commodities level has gone up more than 90 percent.

Over the past few weeks the distributor for Folgers Coffee has said it will hike its price per pound by 11 percent and Starbucks says it will raise the price on a bag of coffee beans in the cafe 17 percent.

How's that for a buzz?

"What we have experienced is really the perfect storm in specialty coffee," Dunn Bros. CEO Chris Eilers said Tuesday.

Yes, it's the price hike tri-fecta. Global weather damaging the coffee bean crop. Speculation on the commodities market for coffee beans. And the age old issue of increased demand and a decreased supply.

"We have seen coffee prices on the bean side go up two to three dollars by the pound," Eilers said.

The good news is that coffee farmers who were really earning low wages globally in years past are now making a good living.

"Coffee farmers are really happy right now," Eilers said.

And oddly so are some of the coffee aficionados like Amy Nelson at Spyhouse coffee in Uptown Minneapolis.

"We really took a huge initiative to find the best coffee we could," Nelson said in response to facing high bean prices.

Spyhouse has been an urban retreat for over a decade and with only two locations its owner cannot absorb massive price increases so those did get passed on to customers.

"We have raised it twice since January," Nelson said.

The price hike for a ten ounce cup of coffee is twenty five cents higher than it was in January.

From: Kare 11