Today I bring you the tales of coffee at two remarkably distinct price points.  The first is FREE COFFEE yes that's right FREE at Starbucks on April 15th if you bring a reusable cup.

This is apparently NOT a tie in with the American tax day deadline.  Even though lots of other places are offering free stuff on the 15th.  (Dunkin Donuts offers free doughnuts, and if you're clever and geographically lucky I guess you can score an entire breakfast this way.)  

According to the Starbucks website, this is part of their "The Big Picture" project to encourage people to bring their own reusable cups.  And more power to them!  This is fantastic, frankly, because disposable paper coffee cups are something of an ecological blight.  I predict that once we've weaned people off those terrible plastic grocery bags, single use disposable coffee cups will be next.  

Starbucks has already had great success with a "free coffee if you bring a travel mug" day in New York City in March.  They're rolling it out to the rest of the country - and the world - tomorrow.  There aren't a lot of details, but I assume that the free coffee is just their regular drip.  Not terribly exciting, but I like the idea of pushing reusable cups.

And now on to the ridiculously expensive coffee!  According to this mind blowing article at The Consumerist, a coffee shop in Baltimore is offering a Very Special Coffee for $13 a cup.  According to the Baltimore Sun, the coffee shop - Spro - slapped this price on a 12 ounce cup of Aida's Grand Reserve.

According to Spro's owner, Aida's Grand Reserve is "It's very juicy, fruity, good mouth feel, medium bodied."  I think we can agree that's all well and good, but $13 for a cup of drip coffee good?

For once in the entire history of "comments on newspaper articles online" found more value in the comments section than in the article itself.  For one thing, it seems that the owner of Spro is some kind of notorious troll on the Baltimore Sun's food articles.  That's pretty funny, honestly, and an excellent example of why you should keep your private and public/professional life separate.

Then a commenter asks if it's true as they heard, that Spro insists on putting the milk and sugar into your coffee for you.  Someone else (who sounds like a shill to me) answers that "The baristas usually dose the cream and sugar because the coffee is of extremely high quality and it's encouraged that the customers taste it first and then can ask for more, in an attempt to preserve the drink that has been made for them."

Ooh la la!  Heaven forbid we, the unwashed masses, should be left to our own judgment as to the amount of milk to put in our coffee!  Seriously, this $13 coffee story gets better and better.  It makes me wish I lived closer to Baltimore, because I would definitely give that $13 coffee a try, if only for the bragging rights.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user bethany actually