A central Christchurch cafe will add a coffee to the menu what could be the country’s most expensive at $99.99 a cup.

Rook Cafe co-owner, Kyle Cabangun, has managed to get his hands on rare ‘Geisha’ beans from Panama.

"[It's from] Mount Totumas estate in Chiriquí, it's a very rare varietal that's renowned for its cup quality and characteristics and is very hard to grow and low yielding,” the barista told RNZ’s Checkpoint.

"It's from a very small award-winning estate and is from an even smaller producing country in the world."

The flavour profile is more like tea than a typical coffee flavour, and Rook Cafe will serve it as a black filter coffee, Cabagun said.

"I'm not going to stop you from adding milk to it, but I would highly encourage you to try it without.

"… It will be a very like fruity, very floral, very delicate cup."

Sourcing the rare beans and flying them 11,000km from the estate to the South Island wasn’t easy, he said.

"We are very fortunate to know a roaster in Australia who happens to be our friend.

"We let him know that we were planning on selling a cup of coffee at $100 as something fun... he knows a guy who knows a guy who had a few 100 grams of this coffee to sell us."

Rook Cafe have two 100g bags of beans, which they hope will yield 14 to 15 cups of coffee, available from 21 September.

"Currently they're just resting and degassing, which is something that you need to do for like lighter roasts of coffee.

"Shortly we'll taste them and then we will dose them up and put them in the freezers to keep them longer so that we don't have to worry about a very expensive coffee going stale and having to throw it out."

Cabangun said a few people had expressed interest in trying Panama’s Geisha, and a couple had already pre-purchased.

"It's definitely very niche... it's a part of the specialty coffee industry [where] there is this world of very high quality, very expensive and sought-after [coffee]."
Stats NZ data shows the average price of a takeaway coffee across the country is now about $5.20, up from $3.90 in mid-2019.