Cup of Excellence

Cup of Excellence (COE) is a national coffee competition and online auction, now run in many producing countries by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE). It began in 1999 in Lavras, Brazil (originally “Best of Brazil”), and created the first online green-coffee auction.¹

Format

• Farmers submit lots; national and international juries cup them blind over multiple rounds.
• Lots scoring 87+ (the current standard) become COE winners and go to auction.
• Cumulative auction revenue: $60M+ since 1999.²
• Each participating country runs its own competition and its own auction — so “the COE record” is really a stack of national records.

As of mid-2026 ACE lists competitions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, and Peru.³

Records

• 980.64/kg — about 445/lb at the 2024 Ethiopia COE — the current record. The lot was grown by smallholder Basha Bekele in Bensa, Sidama, scored 90.50, and was bought by California roaster Angelino’s Coffee. That whole auction drew 4,870 bids and **906,921.81** across 27 lots, at a weighted average of 24.64/lb.⁴
• Beat the Ethiopia 2022 high — **884.10/kg**, roughly 400.50/lb, bought by a UAE company.
• Before that, Costa Rica 2018 held the benchmark at 300.09/lb** for a [[Honey process|honey-process]] [[Geisha]] — which itself tripled a **126.10/lb Brazilian yellow Bourbon.

Full country-by-country ledger, including the buyers and the numbers that don’t hold up: Cup of Excellence records by country.

Who runs the bidding

The auction is a competition result, but it is also a piece of software, and COE has changed suppliers. From late 2022 the auctions ran on M-Cultivo’s platform. In March 2025 COE and ACE announced the two had “decided to part ways,” and moved to a provider called V-Auction.⁵⁶⁷ Neither side gave a public reason. It matters mainly for archive-hunting: COE auction result pages from 2023–24 and from 2025 onwards live on different systems.

COE is fragile where states are: the Ethiopia program was suspended in 2023 amid in-country difficulties, returning in 2024 — and Ethiopia does not appear on ACE’s 2026 country list, a gap flagged on Cup of Excellence records by country.

To verify

Sources disagree on the very first auction’s top price — 2.60/lb** (ACE) vs **1.72/lb (Barista Magazine). ACE’s own 1999 results table backs the 2.60, for the winning Alterosa lot bought by Diedrich; where 1.72 comes from is still unexplained. See Cup of Excellence 1999-2003.

Related

• Cup of Excellence 1999-2003 — the founding five years, year by year
• Cup of Excellence records by country — the year-by-year, country-by-country price ledger
• Best of Panama — the other landmark green-coffee auction
• Green coffee auctions — how the auction mechanism works, and the private auctions ACE also runs
• Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the organization that runs COE
• George Howell — one of the six people COE’s own history names as the original 1999 team
• Angelino’s Coffee — the roaster holding the current record
• Basha Bekele — the farmer who grew the record lot
• Premiumisation — why auction prices climb the way they do
• Coffee scoring — what an “87+” actually means
• M-Cultivo — the auction platform COE used from late 2022 until March 2025

Official links

• Official site — Cup of Excellence
• Official site — Alliance for Coffee Excellence (runs the auctions)

Footnotes

1. Cup of Excellence — official site ↩

2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — official site ↩

3. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — competition & auction results ↩

4. Ethiopian Monitor — Ethiopian coffee smashes Cup of Excellence auction record ↩

5. Tea & Coffee Trade Journal — Cup of Excellence begins transition to new auction provider (28 March 2025) ↩

6. Daily Coffee News — Cup of Excellence names V-Auction new online auction provider (26 March 2025) ↩

7. Wikipedia — Cup of Excellence ↩