Competitions — A–Z

Auctions & award programs (12)

• Alliance for Coffee Excellence — The nonprofit that runs the Cup of Excellence competition and auctions across many producing countries.
• Best of Panama — Panama’s annual green-coffee competition and online auction — home of the world’s record coffee prices.
• Best of Panama results archive — The year-by-year record of Best of Panama winners, cupping scores, and auction prices — what exists, where to find it, and why comparing one year to another is harder than it looks.
• Cup of Excellence — The competition that invented the online green-coffee auction, now run across many producing countries.
• Cup of Excellence 1999-2003 — The first five Cup of Excellence competitions, year by year — who won, what the lots sold for, who bought them, and why the cupping scores are missing from the early records.
• Cup of Excellence records by country — Country-by-country record prices at the Cup of Excellence auctions — who won, what it sold for, and who bought it, with the shaky numbers flagged.
• Echoes of the Peak — The 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.
• Good Food Awards — An American food-and-drink competition whose coffee category judges cup quality and sourcing ethics together — a roaster must taste good and prove how it bought the coffee.
• Green coffee auctions — The mechanism behind the famous record prices — cup a lot blind, score it, then let the world bid on it in the open. How competition auctions, curated auctions and estate-run private sales all turn a cupping score into a public price.
• International Coffee Tasting — The Italian-run medal competition for roasted coffee — judged blind by trained panels, awarded in Platinum and Gold, and increasingly held in Asia rather than Italy.
• Panama Cup — The top overall honour at Best of Panama — the title given to the best specialty coffee producer of the year, above any single-lot placing.
• Vietnam Amazing Cup — Vietnam’s national specialty green-coffee competition, run from Buôn Ma Thuột by the Buôn Ma Thuột Coffee Association — the first Vietnamese contest this wiki can name winning farms for, judged in separate Robusta and Arabica categories.

Championships (17)

• Australian Barista Championship — Australia’s national barista title and the country’s only route to the World Barista Championship — fifteen minutes, twelve drinks, run by the volunteer-led Australian Specialty Coffee Association, and the qualifier behind four Australian world champions.
• Cezve/Ibrik Championship — The World Coffee Championship for coffee brewed in a cezve — the small long-handled pot of Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and the Levant. Who has won it recently, where it is held, and how thin the public record of it actually is.
• Coffee Masters — The knockout barista tournament run inside the London and New York Coffee Festivals — 16 competitors, seven disciplines, head-to-head matches decided in front of a live festival crowd rather than by a scored fifteen-minute routine.
• Nordic Roaster — The Nordic roasting title decided not by a judging panel but by everyone in the room — ten Nordic roasteries roast the same coffee, the whole conference cups it blind, and the averaged scores pick a winner.
• Sprudge Design Awards — The coffee trade’s annual design prize, run by the news site Sprudge since 2023 — free to enter, decided by a public vote across roughly two dozen categories, and judging packaging, cafés, photography and products rather than the coffee inside them.
• Sprudgie Awards — The specialty coffee trade’s annual popularity awards, run by the news site Sprudge since 2009 — reader-nominated, reader-voted, free to enter, and judged on affection rather than cupping scores.
• Swiss Barista Championship — Switzerland’s national barista title and the only way a Swiss competitor gets a seat at the World Barista Championship — three pre-rounds, a semi-final at the Swiss Coffee Festival, and a four-person final.
• World AeroPress Championship — The fan-led global brewing competition in which everyone brews on the same device — an AeroPress — and a blind panel picks the best cup through fast head-to-head elimination rounds. First held in Oslo in 2008 with three people; by 2025 it ran across 70 countries.
• World Barista Championship — Coffee’s biggest individual title — fifteen minutes, twelve drinks, one espresso machine, and a panel of judges deciding the best barista in the world.
• World Brewers Cup — The world championship for hand-brewed filter coffee — one round on beans everyone is given, one round on a coffee the competitor chooses and defends out loud.
• World Coffee Championships — The seven world titles in professional coffee — barista, brewing, latte art, tasting, roasting, coffee cocktails and cezve — how each one is actually judged, and who holds them in 2026.
• World Coffee Championships records — Cross-competition roll-ups for the seven World Coffee Championships — the country medal table and what the imported results archive covers.
• World Coffee Events — The body that ran coffee’s seven world championships — including the World Barista Championship — and which has since been absorbed into the Specialty Coffee Association’s own branding.
• World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship — The world championship for coffee-and-alcohol drinks — a random spirit handed to you at a bar, four drinks on stage, and a compulsory Irish coffee in the final. The only one of the seven world coffee titles built on mixology.
• World Coffee Roasting Championship — The one world coffee title where the competitor never serves a drink — three days of grading green beans, finding a roast profile and delivering it at production volume, judged only on what ends up in the cup.
• World Cup Tasters Championship — The purest test of the seven World Coffee Championships — three cups, two the same and one different, find the odd one, eight times, against a stopwatch. No routine, no coffee to choose, just a palate under a clock.
• World Latte Art Championship — The world championship for the pictures in the foam — six matching drinks in eleven minutes, judged on symmetry, contrast and creativity rather than on how the coffee tastes.

Everything else (21)

• Dale Harris — The British barista who won the 2017 World Barista Championship in Seoul for Has Bean after nine years of trying — and did it on an El Salvador SL28, the only finalist in the top six who did not bring a Geisha.
• Elida Estate — The Boquete estate that broke the $1,000/lb barrier — Panama’s highest coffee farm and a four-generation Lamastus family record-setter.
• Fazenda Paie Filho — The ten-hectare leased plot in Ibiraci, Minas Gerais that won Cup of Excellence Brazil 2019 with a natural Yellow Catuaí at 92.23 points — and sold it for $60.10 a pound, five times the auction average and double the Geisha that came second.
• Finca El Cambalache — The roughly three-hectare Nueva Segovia farm run by Abner Samuel Zavala, which has placed at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence three times — fourth in 2018 and second in 2021 with Maracaturra, and first in the washed category in 2026 at 91.44.
• Finca El Injerto — The Aguirre family’s estate in La Libertad, Huehuetenango — a farm founded in 1874 that has won Guatemala’s Cup of Excellence and set the country’s top auction prices with Pacamara and Geisha.
• Finca El Porvenir (San Fernando) — Sergio Noé Ortez Ortez’s oldest family farm, in the mountains north-east of Ocotal — bought by his father in 1978, worked up from a first harvest of under 150 kg, and the source of Nicaragua’s second-placed natural Pacamara at the 2025 Cup of Excellence.
• Finca El Puente — The Honduran farm that won the 2016 Cup of Excellence at $120 a pound — run by Marysabel Caballero and Moisés Herrera in the highlands of La Paz, and the country’s most consistently decorated name in specialty coffee.
• Finca Elite — The small Mozonte farm in Nueva Segovia, Nicaragua, whose honey-processed Geisha scored 91.77 at the 2025 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence — the highest score of that competition — and which almost nothing else is published about.
• Finca La Esperanza (Dipilto) — The Zavala family’s original farm in Dipilto, Nueva Segovia — 1,300 m, once ordinary washed Caturra selling at 3.55 a pound in 2006, and the source of the washed Geisha that won the 2025 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence at 66.
• Finca Solidaridad — The roughly three-hectare smallholding in Matagalpa, Nicaragua farmed by José Ramón Jarquín Gómez, whose washed Maracaturra placed second at the 2025 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence and sold for $14 a pound.
• Geisha — The Ethiopian-origin variety whose jasmine-and-bergamot cup created the modern ultra-premium coffee market.
• Gwilym Davies — The London street-market coffee-cart operator who won the 2009 World Barista Championship in Atlanta with 623 points — third going into the final, and 17 seconds over the time limit.
• Hacienda La Esmeralda — The Peterson family farm in Boquete, Panama, that made Geisha world-famous and holds the record coffee prices.
• JARC 74165 — The numbered Ethiopian cultivar from the Jimma Agricultural Research Center that won Ethiopia’s 2021 Cup of Excellence outright — the only anaerobic coffee ever to top the country’s national table.
• JD.com — The Chinese e-commerce giant that bought the 2025 Best of Panama natural Geisha for about 3.4 million yuan — the first time a mass-market retail platform, rather than a roaster, took a top auction lot.
• Julith Coffee — Dubai roastery that bought the 2025 Best of Panama record lot — the most expensive coffee ever sold at auction.
• M-Cultivo — The software company that runs most of the world’s specialty coffee auctions — including Best of Panama — and briefly ran Cup of Excellence’s before the two parted ways in 2025.
• Nairobi Coffee Exchange — Kenya’s national coffee auction — a weekly public sale on Haile Selassie Avenue that has set the price of Kenyan coffee since the 1930s, catalogues lots by bean size rather than by farm, and pays growers through a state-mandated settlement system.
• SCAP — The Specialty Coffee Association of Panama, which runs the Best of Panama competition and auction.
• Sidra — The Ecuadorian competition variety with no confirmed pedigree — a tall, thick-trunked plant that has carried two World Barista Championship winners, while no official variety registry can say what it actually is.
• Typica Mejorada — The Ecuadorian competition variety whose name is wrong — it has no Typica in it, no entry in any variety register, and it still won Ecuador’s 2021 Cup of Excellence at 90.39 points and $97.10 a pound.