Basha Bekele

Basha Bekele is a smallholder coffee farmer in Bensa woreda, East Sidama, Ethiopia — “smallholder” meaning he farms a few hectares himself rather than running an estate with hired management. In 2024 his coffee won first place at the Ethiopia Cup of Excellence with a score of 90.50, and one half of the winning lot then sold at auction for $445 a pound: the highest price ever paid at a Cup of Excellence auction in any country.¹²

He is the reason the all-time COE record sits with Ethiopia rather than Central America, and one of the few record-holders in this wiki who is a farmer with a handful of plots rather than a well-known estate.

Story

The 2024 win

The Cup of Excellence is a national competition: farmers submit lots, juries cup them blind over several rounds, and the winners go to a public online auction. Ethiopia’s 2024 edition was judged during international jury week, 8–12 July 2024, with the auction held on 27 August 2024. Twenty-seven lots scored above 87 and became COE winners; another 13 scored 85 or above and were sold as National Winners.

Basha’s coffee took the top spot at 90.50 points (on what that number means, see Coffee scoring). Because the harvest was larger than a single auction lot, it was split into two lots, 1A and 1B, which carry the same score and the same first-place ranking but were bid on separately.

To verify

His surname. The official ACE results table lists the producer as “Basha”, with “Basha Bekele Butusha” as the fuller name in the entry. Trade press spells the third name Botusha instead³ — a transliteration difference rather than two people. The official spelling is Butusha; “Basha Bekele” remains the form everyone including his trading partners uses.

The auction, lot by lot

	Lot	Score	Weight	Price	Total	Buyer
1	1A	90.50	90 kg (198.42 lb)	$445.00/lb	$88,296.90	Angelino’s Coffee (California, USA)
2	1B	90.50	105 kg (231.49 lb)	$350.10/lb	$81,044.65	Orsir International Co. Ltd. (Taiwan) and Saza Coffee

All figures from the official results table. Together the two lots — under 200 kg of coffee, about four ordinary sacks — brought $169,341.55.

The $445/lb figure is the one that made news. Converted, it is roughly $980.64 per kilogram, about 103,000 birr, and Ethiopian reporting described it explicitly as an all-time Cup of Excellence auction record globally, not merely an Ethiopian one. It beat the previous high of $884.10/kg, also an Ethiopian lot, bought by a UAE company in 2022. The Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority called it “a monumental achievement for Ethiopian coffee”.²

For scale, the same auction sold all 27 winning lots for $906,921.81 across 4,870 bids, at a weighted average of $24.64/lb. Basha’s lot went for eighteen times that average. The full ledger of who holds which national record is on Cup of Excellence records by country.

To verify

Saza Coffee’s exact role in lot 1B. ACE names “Orsir International Co. Ltd., SAZA COFFEE” together as the buyer, and the trade press reported the winning bid as Taiwan’s Orsir International. Whether Saza was a co-bidder in a buying consortium or a roaster who took a share afterwards is not stated anywhere consulted here.

To verify

“Presidential Award.” Café Kreyol describes Basha as one of two Presidential Award winners at Ethiopia 2024 — the tier commonly said to be reserved for lots scoring 90 or above. That is consistent with the ACE table, where exactly two producers cleared 90 (Basha at 90.50 and a producer listed as “Mate” at 90.13), but the Cup of Excellence site published no definition of award tiers or score thresholds.⁴ Treat the award name as a reported claim, not an official one.

What the coffee actually was

The winning lot was natural process — the whole cherry is dried around the bean rather than the fruit being washed off first, which pushes the cup towards fruit and fermented sweetness. ACE’s results describe the winning coffees as naturally processed and predominantly the Ethiopian cultivar 74158, a variety released by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center; the roasters selling Basha’s coffee list it as JARC 74158, natural.

This was not a fluke of one lot. Industry writer Christopher Feran noted that the Ethiopia 2024 top 30 contained not a single washed or anaerobic lot — an unusual result in a country long identified with washed coffee.⁵ A producer visit describes Basha as using shade drying, keeping cherries out of direct sun on the beds to slow the dry-down.⁶

To verify

The altitude of the winning lot. Roasters selling coffee from Basha publish three different numbers — 2,360 m,⁷ 2,215 m⁸ and a range of 1,500–2,200 m⁹ — all via the research report, none fetched. These probably describe different plots or different years rather than contradicting each other, but no figure for the actual competition lot appears in the ACE record. Do not quote an altitude for the 2024 winner.

To verify

Honey processing. One roaster reports that Basha, historically a dry/natural producer, has “this year” also introduced honey processing — skin removed, sticky mucilage left on during drying.¹⁰ No source dates this or ties it to the CoE lot, which was natural.

Farm, family and trade

Basha farms in Bensa woreda, in the eastern part of the Sidama zone — the same corner of Ethiopia that supplies much of the country’s highest-scoring natural coffee. Alongside farming he manages a mill, meaning he controls the drying and sorting rather than selling cherry to someone else’s station, which is the usual reason a smallholder’s coffee is traceable enough to enter a competition at all.

His father previously served as treasurer of Daye Bensa Coffee Company, described as the largest exporter out of Sidama, and father and son together own 15.5 hectares of coffee trees; a producer visit names three of his sites as Gibe (new), Kokose and Murago. He has exported through Café Kreyol since 2022,¹¹ and coffee attributed to him has since appeared under several roasters in the UK, Canada and the US.

He credits his father for the outlook, quoting a family belief that “coffee is our bread”. Since the win he has been reinvesting — buying more land and expanding the operation.

To verify

How much land, held how. Café Kreyol says he owns four farms in Bensa; Omwani says he and his father own 15.5 hectares together. These may well be the same land counted two ways, but the sources do not reconcile, and neither reflects a land registry. Do not state a hectare figure as his own holding.

To verify

His age and household. Two roaster bios from the competition year disagree: 30 years old, father of four versus 31 years old, father of four. Both are secondary and undated. No birth year should be published.

Why it mattered

A record price is not a market rate — it is one determined bidder buying one small bag, a caveat that applies to every number on this page and is spelled out on Premiumisation. But two things about this particular record are unusual. It was set by a smallholder, not a famous estate, in a country where farms are typically measured in hectares rather than hundreds of hectares. And it was won by a natural-process Ethiopian heirloom-type variety rather than Geisha, which has dominated the top of the auction market for two decades. The buyer was an American roaster, Angelino’s Coffee, breaking a long pattern of East Asian buyers taking the top lots.

Related

• Bensa — the district he farms in, and the rest of its record cluster
• Sidama — the region above it
• Cup of Excellence — the competition and auction he won
• Cup of Excellence records by country — where his price sits against every other national record
• Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the organization that runs the competition and publishes the results
• Angelino’s Coffee — the California roaster that paid $445/lb for lot 1A
• Orsir Coffee · Saza Coffee — the two companies named on lot 1B
• Coffee scoring · Cupping — what 90.50 points means and how it is arrived at
• Premiumisation — why auction prices climb the way they do
• JARC 74158 — the variety his winning lot was
• Geisha — the variety his win did not involve, which is part of the story
• Alo Coffee · Echoes of the Peak — the other Bensa producer setting records, at its own private auction
• Daye Bensa — the Bensa exporter his father worked for, and a three-time COE placer itself

Official links

• (no official website found — Basha Bekele is a smallholder farmer with no company site or public presence of his own)
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Ethiopia 2024 — the primary record of his win and auction prices

Footnotes

1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2024 results and auction ↩

2. Ethiopian Monitor — Ethiopian coffee smashes Cup of Excellence’s auction record ↩ ↩²

3. Daily Coffee News — California roaster makes record bid of $445/lb at Ethiopia Cup of Excellence ↩

4. Cup of Excellence — official site ↩

5. Christopher Feran — The hegemony of poured concrete and washed Ethiopians ↩

6. Omwani — Meeting Basha Bekele, Ethiopia CoE 2024 winner ↩

7. James Gourmet Coffee — Ethiopian Basha Bekele ↩

8. Philo Coffee — Basha Bekele’s natural heirloom, Ethiopia ↩

9. Oak Cliff Coffee — Basha Bekele ↩

10. Mazelab Coffee — Basha Bekele ↩

11. Café Kreyol — Basha Bekele farmer profile ↩