South America (13)
- Bolivia — A tiny, shrinking, landlocked South American origin — almost all of it smallholder coffee from the Yungas around Caranavi — whose Cup of Excellence ran only from 2004 to 2009 and produced some of the highest cupping scores in the programme’s history for very ordinary money.
- Brazil — The country that sets the world price — a third or more of all the coffee on earth, grown flat, picked by machine, dried in the fruit, and shipped by the shipload. Brazil is what coffee looks like when the problem is scale rather than scarcity.
- Caranavi — The province and municipality in Bolivia’s Yungas that grows most of the country’s coffee — a landscape of one- and two-hectare smallholdings that supplied nearly every ranked lot in Bolivia’s five Cup of Excellence competitions.
- Cerrado Mineiro — The 55-municipality coffee region in western Minas Gerais that became Brazil’s first coffee origin with legal geographical protection — flat, mechanised, dry at harvest, and traceable down to a QR code on every lot.
- Colombia — The country that turned washed Arabica into a brand — half a million small farms on three mountain ranges, one federation that has run the whole thing since 1927, and a national replanting programme that swapped out the coffee people loved for coffee that survives rust.
- Ecuador — A small, shrinking, smallholder origin that grows both Arabica and Robusta at every altitude from sea level to 2,300 m — home of Sidra and Typica Mejorado, and of three Cup of Excellence auctions between 2021 and 2023 that cleared over $100 a pound.
- Huila — The southern Colombian department that grows roughly a fifth of the country’s coffee on farms averaging a hectare and a half — volcanic soil, a legally protected origin name since 2013, its own annual auction, and a reputation built almost entirely by smallholders.
- Minas Gerais — The Brazilian state that grows most of the world’s arabica — roughly three-quarters of Brazil’s arabica crop and about half of all Brazilian coffee, spread across six or seven named sub-regions from the flat mechanised Cerrado to the steep smallholdings of the Atlantic Forest.
- Nariño — The department in Colombia’s far southwest corner, on the Ecuadorian border, that keeps winning the country’s Cup of Excellence — smallholder washed coffee grown almost on the equator, at altitudes that would freeze anywhere else, and the first Colombian region to get its own protected origin name.
- Paraná — The Brazilian state that once grew nearly two-thirds of the country’s coffee and now grows about one per cent of it. A single night of frost in July 1975 ended the largest coffee region on earth, and what came back is small, cold-edge, and quality-minded.
- Peru — A large, smallholder, overwhelmingly organic Arabica origin on the eastern slope of the Andes — fifth in world Arabica exports, with a Cup of Excellence auction that has run since 2017 and a price ceiling stuck around $80 a pound.
- Pitalito — The southern Huila municipality that has become the address most often printed on Colombian competition coffee — tens of thousands of hectare-scale farms in one valley, and a reputation that has run well ahead of its paperwork.
- Yungas — The narrow band of cloud forest on the eastern slope of the Andes, running through Peru, Bolivia and northern Argentina — and, in Bolivia, the strip of La Paz department that grows roughly 95% of the country’s coffee.