Coffee Sketcher

Abner Samuel Zavala

Properties3
descriptionThe second-generation Nueva Segovia producer who has placed at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence four times across eight years — fourth in 2018, second in 2021, first among the washed coffees in 2025 at $66 a pound, and first again in 2026.
tagsperson, nicaragua, nueva-segovia, dipilto, cup-of-excellence, maracaturra, geisha, second-generation
aliasesSamuel Zavala, Abner Zavala, Abner Samuel Zavala Gonzalez, Abner Samuel Zavala González

13 min read

Abner Samuel Zavala

Abner Samuel Zavala is a Nicaraguan coffee producer in Nueva Segovia, the mountainous department on the Honduran border that has quietly become the country’s strongest competition region. He farms two properties his father built — El Cambalache and La Esperanza — and he is on this wiki because of a run of results that is unusually consistent for a small producer: 4th in 2018, 2nd in 2021, 1st among the washed coffees in 2025, and 1st in the washed category again in 2026 at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence.

The single most interesting thing about him is not any one score. It is the price line running through his family’s twenty years of auction records:

YearFarmProducer of recordRankScorePrice
2006La EsperanzaSalatiel de Jesús Zavala Ferrufino (his father)1884.98$3.55/lb
2018El CambalacheAbner Samuel Zavala Gonzalez490.23not published in the entry consulted
2021El CambalacheAbner Samuel Zavala / Indira Paola Zavala290.7530.30/lb
2021La Esperanza—2087.25$9.20/lb
2025La EsperanzaAbner Samuel Zavala1, washed90.7366.00/lb
2026El CambalacheAbner Samuel Zavala1, washed91.44no price published

Every row above 2026 comes from the Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s own published records (accessed 2026-07-23, all confirmed via WebFetch). Same family, same mountains, same competition — and the pound of coffee goes from 66.00 in nineteen years. That is the clearest illustration in this wiki of what a country’s specialty sector looks like when it matures around a working auction.

Story

The father’s farm

The record starts with Salatiel de Jesús Zavala Ferrufino, who entered a farm called La Esperanza in the 2006 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence. ACE’s directory entry for that lot is a snapshot of ordinary Nicaraguan coffee before the specialty boom: Dipilto, Nueva Segovia, 1,300 metres, Caturra, washed and sun-dried, about 7 hectares under coffee, fifteen 30-kg boxes of production. It placed 18th with 84.98 points and sold at 8,100.33, to the American roaster Dillanos Coffee Roasters (ACE farm directory — 84.98, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

Nothing about that is exotic. Caturra, washed, sun-dried, 1,300 m, mid-table score, a price a few dollars above commodity. It is the baseline the rest of this note is measured against.

The son takes over

Abner Samuel studied agronomy in Honduras and, according to the Australian roaster Dimattina Coffee — which later bought his coffee twice — “took over the operation of both La Esperanza and his father’s other farm El Cambalache” around 2018 (Dimattina Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). The same post describes him starting to experiment with micro-lots and unusual processing at that point, which matches exactly what the competition record then does.

His first result under his own name came almost immediately. In 2018 he placed fourth at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence with 90.23 points — a washed Maracaturra from El Cambalache, 498.03 lb. ACE’s directory entry lists the practices behind it: selective picking of only deep-red cherry, anaerobic fermentation of up to 60 hours, and drying on African beds — raised mesh tables that let air move under the coffee (ACE farm directory — 90.23, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch; the 4th place and 90.23 score are independently repeated by Dimattina Coffee).

Read that list against his father’s 2006 entry — “washed, sun dried” — and the generational change is the whole story in two lines. Same land, same variety family, same altitude band. What changed is sixty hours of controlled fermentation and a drying bed.

The 2018 entry also carries his own words: he “feel[s] very blessed by God and proud,” and says the prize money will go to the farm and to disadvantaged children in his community (same ACE entry).

2021 — second place, and both farms in the same auction

The 2021 competition is the best-documented year, because both family farms placed in it and ACE published the full auction table.

El Cambalache took second place overall with 90.75 points for a honey-processed Maracaturra — honey meaning the skin is stripped but the sticky mucilage is left on the bean to dry, a middle road between washed and natural. The producer is recorded as “Abner Samuel Zavala / Indira Paola Zavala”, the only appearance of a second family name in the record. The lot was split in two, each 231.48 lb (105 kg):

LotPriceTotalBuyer
2a$30.20/lb$6,990.70Dimattina Coffee (Australia)
2b$30.30/lb$7,013.84Kyokuto Fadie Corporation (Japan)

La Esperanza entered the same auction and placed 20th with 87.25 points, selling 396.82 lb at 3,650.74 — to Mokka Specialty Coffee (ACE — Nicaragua 2021, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

That pairing is worth pausing on. The same producer, in the same year, at the same auction, sold one coffee at 9.20 — a three-fold spread within one family’s own harvest. Splitting a farm’s output into a competition micro-lot and a merely-good lot is the basic economic move of specialty coffee, and here you can watch it happen in a single published table.

The winner that year, at 90.96, was Jesus Mountain Coffee Company — also Nueva Segovia. Zavala missed first place by 0.21 points.

2025 — first place, and a switch to Geisha

By 2025 the family had planted Geisha, the Ethiopian-descended variety that rewrote coffee prices from Panama outward. La Esperanza’s washed Geisha took first place among the washed coffees at 90.73, and sold as two lots at prices roughly double anything the family had seen before:

LotWeightPriceTotalBuyer
1A198.42 lb$64.40/lb$12,778.25K.V.N. Import Export (1991) Co., Ltd.
1B158.73 lb$66.00/lb$10,476.18Coffee Me Up (Korea) and Two Hands Full (Indonesia)

That is 357.15 lb for $23,254.43 (ACE — Nicaragua 2025, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). Splitting a winning coffee into an A and a B lot is standard practice at Cup of Excellence auctions — it lets two or three buyers each take a share of the same top coffee rather than one bidder taking all of it.

His was neither the most expensive nor the highest-scoring coffee at that auction. The top price was **88.20/lb** for a washed lot called Los Alpes, and the top score was **91.77** — **[[Olman Uriel Sauceda Chávez]]**'s honey [[Geisha]] from **[[Finca Elite|Elite]]** in Mozonte, which won the natural & honey category and yet sold for *less* than Zavala's coffee, at 54.80 and $56.10. But 90.73 was the highest washed score, and the buyers were Thai, Korean and Indonesian — East and Southeast Asian roasters, not the American and European names that bought his father’s coffee in 2006. See Cup of Excellence records by country for where Nicaragua’s numbers sit against everyone else’s, and Ramón Jarquín for the producer who placed second behind him and what the same auction meant at the ordinary end of the price range.

2026 — first again

At the XXII Taza de la Excelencia Nicaragua 2026, Zavala took first place in the “Lavado” (washed) category again, from El Cambalache, at 91.44 — his highest score yet. The two sources disagree on the variety: ACE’s results table says Geisha, Nicaragua’s official gazette says Maracaturra (see the callout below). The awards ceremony was held at Casa de los Flecheros in Matagalpa on 14 May 2026, with the international auction set for 29 June 2026; more than 190 coffees were judged by an Alliance for Coffee Excellence jury (La Gaceta, Nicaragua’s official government gazette, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

The naturals were topped by Inversiones Valladares Acevedo S.A. with a Geisha from Los Alpes, Dipilto, at what the gazette calls a “presidential score” of 92.00 — the same farm that set Nicaragua’s 2025 price record. Nueva Segovia farms took all six podium places across both categories.

Why he matters

Most producers on this wiki are here for a single number. Zavala is here for a shape: four placings across four different competitions, on two farms, in three different processing styles, with two different varieties. That is not luck with one harvest — it is a farm that has learned to make competition coffee repeatedly, which is rarer and harder than one spectacular lot.

He is also a clean case of what Premiumisation looks like from the producer’s side. His father sold at 66.00/lb by controlling fermentation, drying on beds, picking selectively, and planting a variety with a reputation. Nothing about the mountain changed.

To verify

His name is spelled four different ways across the record. ACE’s 2018 farm directory gives “Abner Samuel Zavala Gonzalez”; ACE’s 2025 results give “Abner Samuel Zavala”; the roaster Dimattina calls him “Samuel Zavala”; and a Spanish-language video summary of the 2026 awards renders the winner as “El Cambalache Amber Samuel Zavala”, which is almost certainly a transcription slip for Abner. This wiki treats them as one person, on the strength of the farm names matching in every case. Spanish naming convention carries both parents’ surnames, so Zavala Gonzalez is the likely full legal form. No source gives his own preferred spelling, and none gives a birth year.

To verify

The father–son link rests on one source, though the surnames support it. That Salatiel Zavala founded La Esperanza and Abner Samuel is his son comes only from Dimattina Coffee (accessed 2026-07-23), a roaster that bought his coffee — a trade partner, not a neutral record. It is consistent with the paperwork: ACE’s 2006 entry names Salatiel de Jesús Zavala Ferrufino at La Esperanza, ACE’s 2018 entry names Abner Samuel Zavala Gonzalez at El Cambalache, and under Spanish convention both men carry Zavala as the paternal surname. ACE’s 2018 entry independently says the farm “was inherited three years ago”, that “my father bought it ten years ago”, and that two generations of the family are involved — which fits, without naming anyone. The relationship is very likely right; it is not documented in a primary source.

The 2018 handover date — Dimattina’s December 2019 post says “last year”, giving 2018 — conflicts slightly with ACE’s 2018 “inherited three years ago”, which would put it nearer 2015. Both are loose phrasings. Don’t state a year.

To verify

Who Indira Paola Zavala is. ACE’s 2021 table records the El Cambalache producer as “Abner Samuel Zavala / Indira Paola Zavala”. She appears in no other record consulted here, and nothing establishes whether she is a sister, wife, mother or business partner. Do not guess.

To verify

Farm size at El Cambalache. ACE’s English-language directory entry describes it as a small farm of “4 manzanas” — a Central American land unit of roughly 0.7 hectares, so about 2.8 hectares. Machine translations of that entry render it variously as “4 apples” (manzana is also the Spanish word for apple) and as “four hectares”, which are different numbers. Treat ~2.8 ha as the reading, and don’t quote a hectare figure as fact. No altitude is published anywhere for El Cambalache.

To verify — the 2026 lot was Geisha on ACE's table, not Maracaturra

ACE’s Nicaragua 2026 results page has since been checked (accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). It gives the washed winner as 1A and 1B, El Cambalache, Abner Samuel Zavala, Geisha, Washed, Dipilto, 91.44 points, 198.42 lb and 188.98 lb. That contradicts La Gaceta, which reports the same win as Maracaturra. ACE runs the competition and its table is the better record, but the conflict is unresolved here — do not state the 2026 variety as fact either way. The 91.44 score is new information and is not in the gazette report.

Still no 2026 price. ACE’s 2026 table publishes rank, score, farm, farmer, variety, process, region and weight — no price or buyer columns. The dates printed on that page (“Jury Week May 11–15, 2025”, “Auction June 25, 2025”) also disagree with the gazette’s 14 May and 29 June 2026 and look like stale template text. Quote neither.

A separate YouTube summary claims Zavala achieved the highest score in the whole competition; ACE’s table refutes it — 92.00 for the natural-category winner Los Alpes beats his 91.44 — so it should not be repeated.

To verify

His 2018 lot’s auction price was not found. ACE’s farm directory entry for 90.23 gives the rank, score, variety, process and lot size but no price or buyer. The Nicaragua 2018 results table was not fetched here.

Sources

  1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Nicaragua 2025 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
  2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Nicaragua 2026 results — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch; scores only, no prices or buyers)
  3. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Nicaragua 2021 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
  4. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory entry 90.23, El Cambalache, Nicaragua 2018 — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
  5. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory entry 84.98, La Esperanza, Nicaragua 2006 — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
  6. La Gaceta (Nicaragua) — Cafés de Nueva Segovia destacan en la XXII edición de la Taza de la Excelencia Nicaragua 2026 — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
  7. Dimattina Coffee — Nicaragua Finca La Esperanza, Samuel Zavala — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch; a roaster that bought his coffee, not a neutral source)
  8. GCR Magazine — The Nicaragua coffee industry’s remarkable resilience — accessed 2026-07-23 (fetch blocked, HTTP 403; its reported 2021 second place and 90.75 score are independently confirmed by ACE above)

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