Specialty Coffee Wiki

Echoes of the Peak

Properties3
descriptionThe private Ethiopian auction run by producer Alo Coffee, where a five-kilo lot sold for $1,739 a kilo in 2025 — a national record, but not a Cup of Excellence one.
tagsauction, ethiopia, prices
aliasesEchoes of the Peak auction, Alo Coffee auction, competitions/echoes-of-the-peak, auctions/echoes-of-the-peak

5 min read

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.12

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.34 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.
  • Online, timed bidding through M-Cultivo’s CultivoCommerce marketplace, the same platform that hosts Best of Panama and a dozen other producer auctions.5
  • 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

YearLotPriceTotalNotes
12025record lotUS$1,739/kgUS$8,695 (5 kg)Buyer not named in any source found
22025Craft Reserves LOT-TWH2US$495/kgnot reportedBought by INLIGHT Coffee after 366 bids
32025whole auctionavg US$625/kgUS$135,922.5020 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 US135,922.50** — a weighted average of **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.6

A 2026 edition is scheduled for 10 August 2026 on M-Cultivo.

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 US1,513/kg (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.7

The previous Ethiopian record. The mark Alo broke was US$1,604/kg, paid by Black Gold Coffee for a lot sold as “Sidama Keramo Super Natural” at the Faysel Abdosh Signature Auction on 16 July 2025 — organised by Testi Specialty Coffee with M-Cultivo, and billed as Ethiopia’s first signature auction. Buyer, lot, price, organisers and date are corroborated by two separately published accounts,89 but no primary result sheet for that sale exists either — the same gap as this auction’s. Whether Keramo lies inside Bensa — which would put both Ethiopian private-auction records in one district — is still unconfirmed; see Bensa and Black Gold Coffee.

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.

Footnotes

  1. Alo Coffee Auction — about “Echoes of the Peak” ↩

  2. M-Cultivo — auction events ↩

  3. Ethiopian Business Review — Ethiopian coffee breaks record (Facebook post) ↩

  4. Addis Standard — Ethiopian coffee sets a new auction record (Facebook post) ↩

  5. M-Cultivo — platform overview ↩

  6. Addis Insight — Ethiopian coffee hits $1,739 per kilo in record-breaking auction ↩

  7. Global Coffee Report — Ethiopian coffee fetches record price at auction ↩

  8. Qahwa World — Historic record set at Ethiopia’s first signature coffee auction ↩

  9. Coffee Factz — Ethiopian coffee shatters national auction record ↩

Graph View

Backlinks