Best of Panama results archive
The Best of Panama results archive is the running, year-by-year record of who won the Best of Panama (BoP) green-coffee competition, what each winning lot scored on the cupping table, and what it sold for at the online auction that follows. Because BoP is the event that set — and keeps resetting — the world record price for coffee, its historical results are the closest thing the specialty-coffee world has to a price ledger for the very top of the market.
There is no single tidy public archive of these results. The official competition site (bestofpanama.org, accessed 2026-07-22) and the separate auction site (bestofpanama.auction, accessed 2026-07-22) each foreground the current edition and do not, as of mid-2026, publish an easy year-by-year back-catalogue of past winners and prices. Historical figures therefore have to be pieced together from news coverage, producer announcements, and reference summaries — which is exactly why the numbers below are cross-checked and flagged where they rest on a single source.
Year-by-year records (partial)
Prices are per pound and reflect very small lots — often tens of kilograms — so a headline price is what one determined buyer paid for one bag, not a market rate.
| Year | Notable winning lot | Price / note |
|---|---|---|
| 2004 | Hacienda La Esmeralda Geisha — first separated Geisha entry | $21/lb — the moment the modern ultra-premium market began |
| 2005 | Esmeralda Geisha (Peterson family) | ~$350/lb — reported as the then-record |
| 2017 | Esmeralda Geisha | ~$601/lb — reported as a then-record |
| 2019 | Elida Natural Geisha (Elida Estate, [[Wilford Lamastus | Lamastus family]]) |
| 2024 | Elida Natural Geisha “Torre” (Elida Estate) | 200,260 — Saza Coffee (Japan) |
| 2025 | Esmeralda Washed Geisha, scored 98/100 | ~$13,705/lb — current world record |
The 2025 figures, the perfect 100-point scores, and Esmeralda’s three-category sweep are covered in full on the Best of Panama and Panama Cup notes. Buyers are documented for three years so far: 2019 and 2024 both went to Saza Coffee of Japan (in 2019 as leader of a buying consortium), and in 2025 the record washed lot went to Julith Coffee of Dubai with the natural Geisha to JD.com of China.
To verify
The 2005, 2017, and 2019 prices above come from a single encyclopedic secondary source (Wikipedia: Geisha coffee, accessed 2026-07-22), which cites news reports. They are consistent with the known upward trajectory but have not been re-confirmed against official BoP results here. Treat them as reported-record claims, not settled facts, and check bestofpanama.org before quoting on camera. Intermediate years not listed (2006–2016, 2018, 2020–2023) are simply not compiled here yet. The 2024 row, by contrast, is corroborated by two independent reports — see Saza Coffee.
Why comparing years is harder than it looks
Two lots from two different years are rarely a clean apples-to-apples comparison:
- Edition numbering doesn’t line up with the calendar. BoP is described as founded in 1996 yet its 2025 running was called the “29th” edition — figures that don’t fully reconcile. This same unresolved discrepancy is flagged on the Best of Panama note; it means “the Nth Best of Panama” and “the year 19XX/20XX” can’t always be mapped one-to-one.
- The category structure has changed. Today’s split into Geisha Washed, Geisha Natural, and Varietals (non-Geisha) is relatively recent. Older results predate that structure, so an early “winner” and a modern “category winner” are not the same kind of title. The top-overall honour, the Panama Cup, is itself only loosely documented as a formal award.
- Prices track tiny lots and single buyers. A record price reflects one auction, one lot size, one bidder — so year-to-year jumps exaggerate how much the underlying market moved.
To verify — the claimed "2005-vs-2013 discrepancy"
This note was commissioned around a supposed “2005-vs-2013 discrepancy” in the BoP results archive. No such discrepancy is documented in any Best of Panama coffee source found here: there are verifiable 2005 records but no 2013 figure surfaced, and nothing links the two years. The automated research report supplied for this topic was, in fact, entirely about motorsport “Balance of Performance” (BoP) — the FIA/ACO/IMSA racing rules — and even stray prison-statistics data; it shared only the acronym “BoP” with Best of Panama and contained no coffee content at all. The “2005-vs-2013” framing appears to be an artifact of that acronym collision, not a real coffee-archive issue. If a genuine discrepancy in BoP coffee records for those years exists, it still needs a primary source; nothing here supports it.
Related
- Best of Panama · Panama Cup · SCAP
- Hacienda La Esmeralda · Elida Estate · Peterson family · Wilford Lamastus
- Geisha · Coffee scoring · Cupping · Cup of Excellence
- Julith Coffee · JD.com · Saza Coffee · Premiumisation · China coffee market
Official links
Sources
- Best of Panama — official competition site — accessed 2026-07-23
- Best of Panama — about the competition and BOP protocol — accessed 2026-07-23
- Best of Panama — official auction site — accessed 2026-07-23
- Lamastus Family Estates Auction — Elida Estate’s own site — accessed 2026-07-23
- Hacienda La Esmeralda — official site — accessed 2026-07-23
- Wikipedia — Geisha coffee — accessed 2026-07-23