Echoes of the Peak
Echoes of the Peak is a private coffee auction run by Alo Coffee, an Ethiopian producer-exporter in the Sidama highlands. Alo puts up its own coffee only — this is not a national competition — and bidding runs on the M-Cultivo trading platform, at alocoffee.mcultivo.com (Alo Coffee Auction and M-Cultivo auction events, both accessed 2026-07-23).
It matters because of one number: in September 2025 a lot from this auction sold for US$1,739 per kilogram, the highest price reported for Ethiopian coffee. That figure is frequently mistaken for a Cup of Excellence record. It is not one — see Cup of Excellence records by country.
Format
- One seller. Every lot comes from Alo’s own washing stations, so there is no jury, no national ranking, and no minimum score to clear. A Cup of Excellence auction is the opposite: many farms, blind cupping rounds, and an 87-point cut-off.
- A curated set, not a leaderboard. Alo describes the offering as coffees from Sidama’s highest elevations in four processing families — natural, washed, hybrid, and anaerobic — with two expressions of each (Alo Coffee Auction, accessed 2026-07-23).
- Online, timed bidding through M-Cultivo’s CultivoCommerce marketplace, the same platform that hosts Best of Panama and a dozen other producer auctions (M-Cultivo, accessed 2026-07-23).
- Lots are tiny. The record lot was 5 kg — about four days of coffee for a small café. Prices like these buy a story and a bag, not a supply line. See Premiumisation.
Records
| Year | Lot | Price | Total | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | record lot | US$1,739/kg | US$8,695 (5 kg) | Buyer not named in any source found |
| 2025 | Craft Reserves LOT-TWH2 | US$495/kg | not reported | Bought by INLIGHT Coffee after 366 bids |
| 2025 | whole auction | avg US$625/kg | US$135,922.50 | 20 lots, 217.5 kg, 6,457 bids |
The 2025 sale drew 6,457 bids across 20 lots, which together weighed about 217.5 kg and brought US625/kg. The coffees were grown at 2,400–2,580 metres and reported as variety 74158, the same JARC-bred selection that dominated the 2024 Ethiopia Cup of Excellence (Addis Insight, accessed 2026-07-23).
A 2026 edition is scheduled for 10 August 2026 on M-Cultivo (M-Cultivo auction events, accessed 2026-07-23).
To verify
Lot numbers and the opening lot. One trade report identifies the record lot as NW2 and says the auction’s opening lot NW1 took US7,565), and calls the sale the fourth independent Ethiopian coffee auction. That is Global Coffee Report, which returned HTTP 403 when checked here, so the lot IDs, the NW1 price and the “fourth” edition count are single-sourced and unconfirmed.
The previous Ethiopian record. Reports say the mark Alo broke was US$1,604/kg, paid earlier in 2025 by Black Gold Coffee for a Sidama Keramo super natural lot. No primary result sheet for that sale was found.
The buyer of the record lot is unknown. No source consulted names who paid the US$1,739/kg. Anyone claiming to know should be able to point at an auction result sheet — none is published publicly.
No official results archive. Unlike Best of Panama or the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Alo publishes no post-auction results page. Every number above traces to news coverage of the 2025 sale, not to the auction house.
Why a private auction is a different animal
A national auction like Cup of Excellence or Best of Panama is a competition first: independent judges rank coffee from many farms, and the auction sells the winners. A private auction is a sale first: one producer decides what to offer and how to present it. Neither is dishonest, but the prices are not comparable — a private-auction record says a determined buyer wanted that specific bag, while a competition record also says a jury put that coffee above everyone else’s.
This is exactly why the US$1,739/kg figure keeps landing in the wrong table.
Related
- Alo Coffee — the producer that runs the auction
- Cup of Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country — the competition this is repeatedly confused with
- Basha Bekele — the Bensa smallholder whose COE lot holds the competition record
- Best of Panama — a national auction on the same bidding platform
- Natural process — the processing family behind most Ethiopian record lots
- Premiumisation · Coffee scoring · Cupping
Official links
- Official site — Alo Coffee Auction (“Echoes of the Peak”)
- Bidding platform — M-Cultivo auction events
Sources
- Alo Coffee Auction — about “Echoes of the Peak” — accessed 2026-07-23
- M-Cultivo — auction events — accessed 2026-07-23
- M-Cultivo — platform overview — accessed 2026-07-23
- Addis Insight — Ethiopian coffee hits $1,739 per kilo in record-breaking auction — accessed 2026-07-23
- Global Coffee Report — Ethiopian coffee fetches record price at auction — cited in the research report; returned HTTP 403 on access 2026-07-23
- Ethiopian Business Review — Ethiopian coffee breaks record (Facebook post) — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23
- Addis Standard — Ethiopian coffee sets a new auction record (Facebook post) — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23