A 7.4 earthquake hit western Colombia on 10 August. The epicenter was in Chocó, near San José del Palmar. The Coffee Axis — Pereira, Manizales, Armenia — shook hard enough that the first headlines wrote themselves: dead people, broken roads, and a price spike in the one grocery item Swedes treat as a human right.

Then the growers spoke.

The National Federation of Coffee Growers said the trees were largely intact. What broke was the boring stuff: roads, labor, mills, and for a few days the port of Buenaventura, which handles most of the country’s coffee exports. Shipments were moving again in a little over a week. Reuters interview with FNC, 21 August.

The price shock in Swedish stores never arrived. Filter coffee in Sweden fell 3.9 percent from July to August, according to Matpriskollen, as Expressen reported today. World prices had already eased. Contracts and warehouse stock sit between a hillside in Caldas and a Gevalia pack at ICA. That chain is slow on the way up and slow on the way down. August sits between Colombia’s mid-year mitaca harvest and the main October–December crop, which also helps explain why a mid-month quake did not empty the shelf.

Sweden usually lands in the global top ten for coffee per person. That sounds important until you look at the CPI weights. When coffee and chocolate each jumped around 30 percent last year, Statistics Sweden put their contribution at roughly 0.1 percentage points apiece. A 3.9 percent monthly drop in filter coffee will not rewrite August inflation. Energy will. It always does.

I already wrote in May that the VAT cut on food was doing more work than the commentariat wanted to admit, while Hormuz was doing the opposite through fuel. SCB publishes CPIF and measures that strip out energy for a reason. Headline CPI with a war premium baked into electricity and diesel is a lousy way to describe the price of fika.

The honest risk to coffee from here is not the quake. It is weather — El Niño — and whatever oil does while the Strait of Hormuz stays a mess. I have complained about that strait before. It keeps finding new ways to tax a Stockholm kitchen.

SCB drops August inflation shortly. I will look at the coffee line, then at energy, then at whether anyone still bothers to separate the two.

If the coffee line barely moves and the energy line does all the shouting, we already know the story.