In May, this publication calculated that Germany's incoming income tax reform -- effective January 2027, EUR 100 to 400 a year depending on income -- works out, for a worker at the low end, to EUR 3.85 a week. We called it one coffee. Katja Schon, a former nurse and single parent living on Burgergeld in Homberg-Efze, was not available for comment at the time. The relief still does not arrive for another five months.

The obvious follow-up question: does EUR 3.85 still buy a coffee, or has the coffee itself moved on without the tax reform noticing?

We checked. It has not moved much.

Raw coffee has had a violent two years. Destatis recorded raw bean import prices up 53.1 percent year on year as of April 2025. Wholesale roasters in Schleswig-Holstein told NDR their input costs had roughly doubled since 2022 -- one Kiel roastery paying around EUR 40,000 for thirty sacks that cost EUR 20,000 the year before. This publication reported separately, in an interview with Hartfeld Group's R. Voss, that Arabica futures swung from a 52-week high of 4.38 US dollars a pound to a low of 2.43 and back to 3.23 within the same period, using the Amt24 platform to argue the swings track positioning more than climate. None of this is in dispute.

What did not move, in the same window: the cup. The same NDR reporting found a cappuccino in Barsbuttel up 30 cents since 2022. Consumer bean-coffee prices nationally, per Destatis, were up 12.2 percent year on year in April 2025 -- against the 53.1 percent import figure, a ratio of roughly one to four.

Starbucks Germany's own published prices -- the closest thing to a standardised national figure -- show a Tall Caffe Latte at EUR 3.99 and a Grande at EUR 4.59 as of this year. The same chain's German cappuccino was quoted at EUR 3.25 in 2016. Call it 25 to 40 percent growth across nine years, most of it presumably absorbed well before the last two years of raw-price chaos began.

The pattern holds everywhere we looked: whatever happens to the bean, the cup moves later and by less. Cafes and roasters appear to treat their own margin as the shock absorber, not the customer, for as long as they can manage it -- which, on this evidence, is longer than two years of a doubled input cost.

This means the EUR 3.85 figure calculated in May is, if anything, a safer bet than most single-item inflation benchmarks a government could have chosen. The coffee is one of the few things in this economy that has reliably failed to get more expensive at the pace of its own raw material. Whether that reflects well on German cafe owners' pricing discipline or poorly on their margins is a separate question, and not one the tax reform was designed to answer.

Professor K. Glasskugel's projected "German cafe recovery" -- the consumption uptick modelled off the same tax reform, and the one Vienna's coffee house association has still not responded to -- remains, on this evidence, at least mathematically solvent. Whether it also remains a threat to Kaffeehauskultur is, as before, not something this publication is in a position to settle.