Specialty Coffee Wiki

Fazenda Paie Filho

Properties3
descriptionThe 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.
tagsfarm, brazil, minas-gerais, sul-de-minas, cup-of-excellence, catuai, natural
aliasesPaie Filho, Fazenda Paie Filho Brazil, Paie Filho Ibiraci, farms/fazenda-paie-filho

9 min read

Fazenda Paie Filho

Fazenda Paie Filho is a small coffee farm in Ibiraci, Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the Sul de Minas growing region, run by André Luis Aguila Ribeiro. It is on this wiki for one reason: it produced the winning coffee of the 2019 Cup of Excellence Brazil, a naturally processed Yellow Catuaí that scored 92.23 and took the highest price of that entire auction at US$60.10 a pound.1

The interesting part is the scale. The farm has ten hectares under coffee, on leased land the producer only took on in 2012, and the winning lot was 396.84 pounds — about 180 kilograms, less than a single pallet.2 In a country that ships tens of millions of 60-kilogram bags a year, the best coffee in Brazil that year came off a rented plot smaller than most Brazilian farms’ equipment yards.

LocationIbiraci, Minas Gerais, Brazil — region given as Sul de Minas2
ProducerAndré Luis Aguila Ribeiro12
Altitude1,060 m2
Coffee growing area10 ha (leased)2
Leasing began20122
Best result92.23, 1st place, Cup of Excellence Brazil 20191
Highest price achievedUS$60.10/lb1
VarietyYellow Catuaí (Arabica)12
ProcessingNatural12

The 2019 win

The 2019 Brazil Cup of Excellence auction closed on 26 November 2019. Paie Filho’s winning coffee was split into two lots — the standard practice when a single coffee is too small to satisfy every bidder — and both were sold the same day, at the two highest prices on the table.1

RankFarmVarietyProcessScoreLot sizePriceTotalBuyers
11aFazenda Paie FilhoYellow CatuaíNatural92.23396.84 lb$60.10/lb$23,850.08Maruyama Coffee, Goodboybob Coffee, Harrods1
21bFazenda Paie FilhoYellow CatuaíNatural92.23396.84 lb$50.80/lb$20,159.47Takamura Coffee Roasters1
32aFazenda PrimaveraGeishaNatural anaerobic92.15330.7 lb$30.50/lb$10,086.35Saza Coffee, Maruyama Coffee, Proud Mary Coffee1

Set those numbers against the rest of the auction. The whole 2019 sale moved 22,024.62 lb for 259,870.67**, an average of **11.80/lb, with the cheapest winning lot at 7.00/lb**.[^1] Paie Filho's 1a lot cleared **more than five times the average** and, between the two lots, brought in **44,009.55 — roughly 17% of the entire auction’s value off about 360 kilograms of coffee.

Two of the buyers are worth naming. Maruyama Coffee of Japan and the London department store Harrods shared the top lot with the Los Angeles roaster Goodboybob; the second lot went outright to Takamura Coffee Roasters in Osaka.1 That is the ordinary shape of a Cup of Excellence sale — Japanese specialty buyers, a luxury retailer, and a small American roaster splitting a few hundred pounds between them.

This wiki’s Brazil note previously flagged the 60.10/lb figure as **unattributed** — the price was visible on the results page but could not be tied to a farm. Reading the [[Alliance for Coffee Excellence]] results table directly for this note settles it: **the 60.10 belongs to Paie Filho’s 1a lot**, and the buyers are named.1

What beat a Geisha

The headline result is not really the score. It is what the score was achieved with.

Yellow Catuaí is Brazil’s workhorse. It was bred at the Instituto Agronômico in Campinas and released in 1972 for yield and a short frame that makes it easy to pick — it is the variety planted across the country by the million, the agricultural default. It is not a trophy cultivar. Geisha, the variety that wins auctions everywhere on earth, placed second in 2019 with a natural anaerobic lot from Fazenda Primavera at 92.15 — and sold for half what the Catuaí did.1

So the farm’s real claim is an argument about where cup quality comes from. Same country, same competition, same natural drying tradition: the commodity variety on a well-run ten-hectare plot beat the rare one. As the Catuaí note puts it, the variety sets a ceiling and the farm decides where inside it a lot lands.

How the coffee was made

The Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s own farm record for the winning entry describes the post-harvest routine in unusual detail:2

  • Selective mechanical harvesting, with three passes through the field — a machine shaken to knock off only the ripe cherries, run repeatedly as the crop ripens, rather than stripping the whole branch once. This is the Brazilian compromise between the country’s mechanised model and the selective hand-picking most competition coffee relies on.
  • Slow drying on concrete patios — the fruit dried whole, in the open, the natural method Brazil is built around.
  • A 30-day rest in bags before milling, letting the moisture even out through the parchment.

None of that is exotic. It is the standard Brazilian playbook executed carefully on a small area — which is rather the point.

The competition’s own cupping notes for the lot run to: passion fruit, white nectarine, watermelon, guava, honey, pineapple, tropical, black currant, molasses, dark fruit, sweet, cinnamon, anise, black licorice, brown sugar, with the palate recorded as “creamy, well balanced, composed, elegant” and the cup described as improving as it cooled.2

Where it sits

Ibiraci is a municipality in the Sul e Sudoeste de Minas mesoregion of Minas Gerais, whose town centre sits at about 1,071 m and which has roughly 7,000 hectares under coffee in total.3 That corroborates both halves of the farm record: the Sul de Minas regional label ACE uses, and the 1,060 m altitude — which is ordinary for Brazil and low by Latin American specialty standards, as the Brazil note explains.

To verify — the Cup Tasters claim

The ACE farm record includes the line “André is the current Brazilian Cup Tasters champion,” written at the time of the 2019 competition.2 Searches for André Luis Aguila Ribeiro in connection with the Brazilian national Cup Tasters (Prova de Xícaras) title returned no results at all — no national body record, no year, no press. ACE’s farm pages carry text supplied by or on behalf of the producer, so this is one claim from an interested party, not a competition record. Do not repeat the title without a year and a source from the Brazilian national body.

To verify — ownership, history, and everything after 2019

Nobody has published a history of this farm. ACE records the producer as “Farmer/Rep.” and says he began leasing land in 2012 to focus on specialty coffee;2 no source consulted states whether he owns the property, how long the family has grown coffee, or what the farm did before 2012. The farm is a tenant operation on the only record available — treat “owner” as unconfirmed.

There is also no documented result after 2019. The farm has one Alliance for Coffee Excellence entry. No later Cup of Excellence placing, private-auction lot, or roaster release was found for it, and no official website, farm page or social account could be located in searches for this note. A national championship in 2019 does not appear to have turned into an ongoing brand — but absence of evidence in a Portuguese-language trade press that is poorly indexed in English is weak evidence. Check ACE’s Brazil archive for 2020 onward before saying the farm has not competed since.

Why it matters

Paie Filho is a useful counterweight to the two Brazilian farms this wiki already documents. Daterra is a large, technologically sophisticated estate in Patrocínio that subdivides itself into hundreds of mini-farms; Camocim Estate is a certified biodynamic property farming inside Atlantic Forest. Both are institutions with stories, websites and decades behind them.

Paie Filho is none of that. It is ten leased hectares, a common variety, patio drying, and one very good harvest — and it produced the highest-scoring and highest-priced coffee in Brazil in 2019.

That is worth holding onto for three reasons:

  • A farm name is not the unit of quality; a lot is. The whole Cup of Excellence apparatus exists to find the lot, not the estate — which is why a first-time entrant on rented land can win it.
  • Brazil’s ceiling is high and its prices are not. A 92.23 is competitive with any origin on earth. It still sold for 60.10/lb in a year when Costa Rica's record was 300.09/lb and Ethiopia’s has since gone far higher. See Cup of Excellence records by country.
  • The variety hierarchy is softer than the marketing suggests. A Catuaí beat a Geisha by eight hundredths of a point and doubled its price.

Footnotes

  1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Brazil 2019 results — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 26 November 2019 auction date, the 1a and 1b placings at 92.23, the 60.10/lb and 50.80/lb prices, the 396.84 lb lot sizes, the 23,850.08 and 20,159.47 lot totals, the named buyers, Fazenda Primavera’s second place, and the 22,024.62 lb / 259,870.67 / 11.80 per lb / $7.00 minimum auction totals ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13

  2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory: Fazenda Paie Filho, 92.23 — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Ibiraci, MG location, the Sul de Minas region, 1,060 m altitude, 10 ha growing area, the 2012 start of leasing, the Yellow Catuaí variety and natural process, the three-pass selective mechanical harvest, patio drying and 30-day bag rest, the flavour and palate notes, and the Brazilian Cup Tasters claim ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12

  3. Ibiraci — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Sul e Sudoeste de Minas mesoregion, the ~1,071 m town elevation and the ~7,000 ha of coffee in the municipality ↩

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