Black Gold Coffee

Black Gold Coffee is the buyer that paid US$1,604perkilogram\ast \ast foralotcalled\ast \ast SidamaKeramoSuperNatural\ast \ast atthe\ast \ast FayselAbdoshSignatureAuction\ast \ast in\ast \ast July2025\ast \ast .Atthemomentthehammerfell,thatwasthehighestpriceeverreportedforEthiopiancoffee.Itstayedthehighestforabouteightweeks,until[[AloCoffee]{]}^{\prime }s[[EchoesofthePeak]]saleinSeptember2025cleared\ast \ast US$1,739/kg.

This note exists because of that one purchase. Almost nothing else about the company is documented in any source that could be read here — not its country beyond one claim, not its website, not what it does with the coffee. That is unusual and worth saying plainly: a name on a record-breaking bid is not the same as a company anyone can look up.

The purchase

Lot	Sidama Keramo Super Natural
Price	US$1,604/kg\ast \ast —about\ast \ast US$727/lb
Auction	Faysel Abdosh Signature Auction, Ethiopia’s first “signature” single-producer auction
Organisers	Testi Specialty Coffee, in partnership with M-Cultivo
Date	16 July 2025
Record status	Highest reported Ethiopian price at the time; beaten in September 2025

Two independently published accounts of the sale agree on the buyer, the lot name, the price, the organisers and the date (Qahwa World, confirmed via WebFetch 2026-07-23; Coffee Factz, confirmed via WebFetch 2026-07-23). Trade coverage in Global Coffee Report and BeanScene carries the same figures, though both were unreadable when checked here.

What the price actually means. US$1,604/kg is roughly 200 times what ordinary excellent Sidamo natural coffee fetches at the port — the trade range for Sidamo Natural Grade 1 sits in the single digits per kilo (see Sidama). A number like this is one determined bidder buying one small bag, not a market rate. This is the mechanism described in Premiumisation, and it is why a record price tells you almost nothing about what neighbouring farms were paid.

And it is not a Cup of Excellence record. The Faysel Abdosh sale was a private auction — one seller offering their own coffee, no blind jury, no minimum score to clear. COE is a competition first and an auction second. The two prices get filed in the same table constantly, and shouldn’t be; see Cup of Excellence records by country. For scale, the all-time competition record is US$980.64/kg($445/lb), paid by Angelino’s Coffee for Basha Bekele’s lot at the 2024 Ethiopia COE — which the Keramo lot beat by about 63% on a per-pound basis.

What “Sidama Keramo Super Natural” is naming

Three things, none of them a farm:

• Sidama — the region in southern Ethiopia. See Sidama.
• Keramo — a place name that appears on Ethiopian coffee bags, commonly associated with the Bensa district but not confirmed as a Bensa kebele by any official source read here. If it is in Bensa, then both Ethiopian private-auction records came out of one district.
• Super Natural — a marketing phrase, not a defined process. It implies a natural (dried-in-the-fruit) coffee handled with unusual care, but no source consulted publishes the actual protocol.

No producer name, altitude, cup score or lot weight for this coffee is published anywhere consulted. For a purchase at this price, that absence is the story.

To verify — who Black Gold Coffee actually is

• Country and business type. One trade report names the company’s founder as Wang Hsin Chun (Qahwa World, fetched 2026-07-23) and a Japanese coffee blog describes the buyer as Taiwanese, but that is a single blog and the trade report states no country. A second report calls it simply a “coffee buyer/importer” (Coffee Factz, fetched 2026-07-23). Do not state that Black Gold Coffee is Taiwanese, or that it is a roaster, as fact.
• No official web presence could be confirmed. Searches on 2026-07-23 surfaced a blackgoldroasters.com and a bgcoffeecompany.com, both of which appear to be unrelated US businesses (Venice, Florida and a Kona-association member respectively) that happen to share the name. Nothing connects either to the Ethiopian purchase. See the Official links section.
• Whether it bid directly or through an agent is unknown. Auction buyer names are sometimes importers acting for a roaster.

To verify — the auction itself

• No primary result sheet exists. Unlike Best of Panama or the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, the Faysel Abdosh Signature Auction publishes no public results archive that could be found. Every figure on this page traces to news coverage, not to the auction house or M-Cultivo.
• The date is reported two ways. Organiser-linked coverage says 16 July 2025; at least one later news item refers to the inaugural online auction as 17 July. Whether that is a correction, a time-zone artefact, or two different days of a multi-day sale is unresolved.
• The full catalogue is unknown — number of lots, total volume, bid counts, other buyers and the average clearing price were not published in anything read here. One account mentions only “thousands of bids recorded over multiple hours.”
• Is the auction named after the 2021 Cup of Excellence winner? A producer called Faysel Abdosh Yonis was an Ethiopia COE National Winner in 2021 from Bensa, scoring 87.26 with a natural lot — and Testi Trading PLC, whose name matches the auction’s organiser, placed in the same 2021 tables (see Bensa and JARC 74158). That strongly suggests the auction is a signature sale for that producer, but no source consulted states the connection, so it is not asserted here.
• “Project Direct.” Both reports of the sale mention a community initiative of that name — said to fund schools, clinics and water systems — presented as a beneficiary of the auction proceeds. Neither report links a project document, and no independent confirmation was found. How much of the US$1,604/kg reached the farm or the fund is not disclosed.

Why a buyer’s name belongs in a coffee encyclopedia

Record prices are usually credited to the coffee and the producer, and the buyer becomes a footnote. But the buyer is half of the number: a private auction price is a measure of how much one company wanted one bag, which makes who they are the load-bearing detail. When the same handful of names — Julith Coffee, Saza Coffee, JD.com, Angelino’s Coffee — keep reappearing across unrelated national auctions, it tells you the ultra-premium market is a small, identifiable room of bidders registered on shared platforms like M-Cultivo’s. See Buying consortium.

Black Gold Coffee is the exception that makes the point: a name with no traceable presence, holding a national record for two months. It is a reminder that “world record coffee price” is a claim about an auction result, and auction results are only as checkable as the house that publishes them.

Related

• Echoes of the Peak · Alo Coffee — the September 2025 private auction that beat this price at US$1,739/kg
• Bensa — the district Keramo is usually associated with, and where the record cluster lives
• Sidama — the region on the lot’s name, and what ordinary coffee from it sells for
• M-Cultivo — the platform that ran the bidding
• Angelino’s Coffee · Basha Bekele — the buyer and producer behind the Cup of Excellence record this price beat
• Cup of Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country — the competition record this is repeatedly confused with
• Natural process — the processing family behind “Super Natural”
• JARC 74158 — the numbered Ethiopian selection behind most of the country’s record lots
• Premiumisation · Buying consortium — why one bag sells for 200× the market price, and who is in the room
• Julith Coffee · Saza Coffee · JD.com — the recurring buyers at the top of the market
• Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority — the regulator whose export figures show the ordinary price of Ethiopian coffee

Official links

• (no official website found — searches on 2026-07-23 returned only same-named US businesses with no connection to the Ethiopian purchase)
• Auction platform — M-Cultivo — the company that ran the bidding for the sale

Sources

1. Qahwa World — Historic record set at Ethiopia’s first signature coffee auction — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
2. Coffee Factz — Ethiopian coffee shatters national auction record — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
3. Global Coffee Report — Inaugural Ethiopian coffee auction achieves record price — checked 2026-07-23, returned HTTP 403; figures read only via search snippet
4. BeanScene — Ethiopian coffee breaks auction record — accessed 2026-07-23 via search snippet only
5. Daily Coffee News — Weekly Coffee News: Ethiopia auction record (25 July 2025) — checked 2026-07-23, returned HTTP 403
6. Mr Bean Coffee — Historic record set at Ethiopia’s first signature coffee auction — checked 2026-07-23, returned HTTP 404
7. Addis Standard — Ethiopian coffee sets a new auction record at US$1,739 per kilogram (Facebook post) — cited in the research report as the source that the Keramo record was later surpassed, not independently fetched, 2026-07-23
8. Search aggregate — “Black Gold Coffee” Keramo auction Ethiopia — accessed 2026-07-23
9. Search aggregate — “Black Gold Coffee” official site / Taiwan — accessed 2026-07-23 (returned only unrelated same-named businesses)