You can’t buy much at Burning Man Festival — not even coffee anymore

Burning Man Festival in Nevada has decided to remove coffee from its buyable menu.

The festival in Black Rock Desert, which is an event that promotes acceptance, self-reliance and art from Aug. 28-Sept. 5, used to sell only ice and coffee — until now, according to SF Gate.

On the Burning Man website’s Love Letter to the Center Camp Coffee Shop blog post, the assistant manager of Center Camp Cafe wrote, “Making this choice aligns with Burning Man Project’s long term sustainability goals and initiatives and the Principle of Decommodification.”

The cafe’s environmental footprint was beginning to no longer align with the values of the festival, officials said.

“Every great city should provide these spaces — and this IS that space — yet do cities provide the coffee itself?” associate director of operations, Laura Day, wrote in a blog post. “No, that’s offered by members of the community. And in our decommodified city, coffee could be an element of the prevailing gift economy. Perhaps the city’s population has grown enough to take on the caffeination of the [Burner] nation. We aim to test this theory.”

The cafe was using 30,000 cups and 25,000 gallons of greywater through the week of Burning Man, according to the blog.

Although the festival of Burning Man won’t be supplying coffee, the playa won’t go uncaffeinated. The organization estimates that 10 percent of camps give out coffee equally around 150 self-serve cafes, according to SFGate.

In 1995, the Center Camp Coffee Shop was implemented as a single espresso machine that sat on top of hay bales, according to its website. Then in 2000, the coffee shop was able to move under a huge structure that sheltered it from the 120 mph winds that goers experience at Burning Man. Now, the Center Camp Coffee Shop had over 1,000 volunteers.

The event relies on its 10 principles, including radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation and immediacy, according to its website.

Black Rock Desert is about 140 miles northeast of Reno.

This story was originally published September 2, 2022 at 9:38 AM with the headline "You can’t buy much at Burning Man Festival — not even coffee anymore."