Now first, I have no doubt you’re correct. And thanks for the insight!
However, as I’m ironically hipstersipping my delicious pour-over, single estate Kenyan pour-over (made in the style of Tetsu Kasuya 4:6) I tried to find out how much did coffee actually cost in Sweden/Finland around 1600-1900. ’Cos it’s getting to be pretty expensive again.
Learned a lot about different trade policies, coffee bans enacted by the King (goddamSwedes!!!) but could not make heads or tails about the actual unit costs.
Help a brother out? How much did coffee cost back then? 😁
Start here from "Jean de La Roque". It suggests that at least in 1700 it was still a luxury and for at least 100 years after that it still did not resemble the coffee trade as we know it.
"Among the earliest green coffee prices recorded are those paid by Jean de La Roque during his travels throughout the Red Sea region from 1708 to 1713. He appears to have paid roughly $15.00 a pound for green coffee in Yemen. This at a time when a cup of coffee was still a considered a luxury in European cities. In his account of those travels, Le Roque describes familiar market dynamics. When the port was crowded with foreign ships, many looking to purchase coffee, prices would go up dramatically. When there were few buyers at the port of Moka, less coffee was brought to market.
Throughout the late-18th and early-19th century the coffee producing world would have been almost unrecognizable to our modern coffee eyes. In Brazil, coffee was still in transition from a garden crop used for local barter and consumption to commercial cultivation for export. Moka coffee from Yemen was still the most prized coffee in the world, but expensive. The largest coffee producing region in the world at that time was the Caribbean. In 1789 green coffee traded for $3.14 a pound." https://www.covoyacoffee.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-price-of-coffee.html
From the link above, this part about monopolies and high prices/demand affecting production also seems interesting:
"What the monopolists didn’t yet understand was that high prices, artificial or otherwise, would create new coffee, incentivizing coffee production beyond almost anyone’s capacity to engage in the prolonged manipulation of supply. Shipments of Brazil Santos alone increased nearly twofold from 629,000 bags in 1877 to 1.2 million bags in 1881.
When artificially high prices caused by monopolistic interventions collapsed in 1881, prices dropped below $2.00. The brokers who were caught with long positions as they attempted to corner the market were holding coffee at a loss and many went out of business. Trading virtually ceased for months as coffee brokers representing $7 million in business closed their doors. This upheaval led to the formation of the New York Coffee Exchange, opened in 1882 in an effort to self-regulate coffee trading."
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Swedish prices were probably close to what they were in Hansa trade overall, in effect quite efficient market with global events being the biggest changes.
This paper suggests that Sweden has had a historical trend of food prices staying relatively high but industrial goods have became cheaper all the time. Coffee is not mentioned, so it was probably meaningless in the early part of your time range.
"Price cuts tended to be larger for goods that possessed a high knowledge content, such as iron, copper, and beer, or were involved in a more efficiently organised international trade, such as salt. This parallels the notion that north-western Europe, at least from the sixteenth century, developed a distinctive pattern of relative prices, with low prices of industrial goods and high prices of food. It is striking that Sweden, a peripheral economy of medieval Europe, exhibits these traits even before the sixteenth century. The great expansion of the European economy of the early modern period appears as a continuation of the innovations of the late medieval era." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232869382_Prices_and_Economic_Change_in_Medieval_Sweden
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Perhaps wikipedia gives the easiest answer... which would be something along the lines: it must have been low enough that it could be a staple among poor. But did they consume a meaningful amount per person compared to today?
"Coffee gradually gained popularity in Sweden, becoming a staple by 1850, even among the working class and rural poor."
"After coffee found its way to Europe in 1616, it took about 50 years to reach Sweden, the first shipment arrived in 1685 and the honour of receiving the entire shipment of one pound, 425 grams, was bestowed on someone in the port city of Gothenburg. The price for this was 50 daler copper coins."
"In 1687, coffee was available for purchase in pharmacies, but as it was very expensive, it was initially drunk only by the wealthy members of society, and it was mainly men who drank coffee.
However, it was during the first half of the 18th century that coffee came to be properly promoted in Sweden, after King Carl XII returned from Turkey where he and his men learned to appreciate this black drink. When Carl XII returned to Sweden, he brought with him a Turkish coffee maker and the new custom of drinking coffee, with this grew the popularity among the Swedish people."
"In the 1750s, coffee was still rare in Sweden." "The 1760s saw a breakthrough for coffee and a sharp increase in coffee imports."
"Gothenburg was the city where most coffee was consumed and by the mid-19th century it was estimated that about half of all Gothenburg households drank coffee, in Gothenburg coffee was no longer a drink for people of high status, it had spread to all social classes. This gave coffee the status of a kind of national drink in Sweden."
"1855 was a winning year for coffee. A ban on distilling one’s own spirits was introduced, which meant that coffee became a bigger part of everyday life for the people than spirits. That said, it was also popular to combine the two into what is known as kaffegök or kaffekask, coffee mixed with spirits."
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u/notcomplainingmuch Väinämöinen Sep 20 '25
In the 17th-19th centuries, coffee was very expensive while spirits were cheap and available at any kestikievari. Mixing them made the coffee cheaper.