Panama Cup
The Panama Cup — also called Best Producer of the Year — is the highest overall honour at the Best of Panama (BoP) competition. Where BoP’s category prizes reward individual winning lots (a single coffee), the Panama Cup recognises the producer whose coffees do best across the whole competition. It is a “best of the best” title for the estate, not for one bag of beans.
Think of BoP as having two layers of winners: each category (Geisha Washed, Geisha Natural, and Varietals) crowns its top coffees, and then — sitting above all of them — the Panama Cup names the producer judged strongest overall that year (Newsroom Panama, 2025, accessed 2026-07-22).
Why it matters
The Panama Cup is the single most prestigious thing a Panamanian coffee farm can win. It tells buyers, roasters, and the wider specialty world that the estate is not a one-lot wonder but consistently excellent across varieties and processing styles. Winning it lifts a producer’s reputation — and, in practice, the prices its lots fetch at the Best of Panama online auction, where record-breaking sums are paid per pound.
In 2025 the Cup went to Hacienda La Esmeralda, the Peterson family estate in Boquete. Esmeralda did something no producer had done before: it took first place in all three categories at once — the “Triple Crown” — and so won the Panama Cup as, in the words of the announcement, “the best specialty coffee producers in the country” (Newsroom Panama, 2025, accessed 2026-07-22). The same run set two world-record cupping scores — a washed Geisha at 98.00 and a natural Geisha at 97.00 — with the varietal category won by a Laurina lot (Crowd Roaster, 2025, accessed 2026-07-22). See Best of Panama and Hacienda La Esmeralda for the full score and auction-price tables.
To verify
How the Panama Cup winner is formally decided is not confirmed by an official source. The engine research report describes it as an aggregate of a producer’s top scores across categories, but the official Best of Panama competition page (bestofpanama.org/competition, accessed 2026-07-22) does not mention a “Panama Cup” or a “Best Producer” award at all — it only describes per-category placements (“Top mean-scored coffees awarded as Best of Panama Coffees”). So it is unclear whether the Panama Cup is a standing, formally-scored trophy awarded every year, or a champion’s title that in 2025 was clear-cut only because one estate swept every category. Treat the “aggregate scoring across categories” mechanism as an unverified description, not established fact, until an official SCAP/BoP source documents it.
To verify
Whether the name “Panama Cup” is an official award title or a media/branding label for the champion is also unconfirmed. It appears in the 2025 announcement headline and body, but not on the official competition page. Confirm with SCAP or bestofpanama.org before treating “Panama Cup” as the formal name of a distinct trophy.
Related
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
- Newsroom Panama — Panama breaks two coffee world records and crowns Panama Cup 2025 champions — accessed 2026-07-23
- Crowd Roaster — 2025 Best of Panama report — accessed 2026-07-23