Olman Uriel Sauceda Chávez
Olman Uriel Sauceda Chávez is a coffee producer in Mozonte, Nueva Segovia, the department on Nicaragua’s Honduran border that now supplies most of the country’s competition coffee. He grows at Finca Elite, and he is on this wiki for one number: 91.77, the score his honey-processed Geisha took at the 2025 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence — the highest score of that entire competition, in either category.
The reason that is worth a note is what happened to the price. It didn’t follow.
| Score | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| Sauceda’s Elite (honey Geisha, 2025) | 91.77 — highest in the competition | 56.10/lb |
| Abner Samuel Zavala’s La Esperanza (washed Geisha, 2025) | 90.73 | 66.00/lb |
| Los Alpes (washed, 2025) | not the top score | $88.20/lb — highest in the competition |
Every figure above is from the Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s published auction table for Nicaragua 2025 (accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). The best-tasting coffee in the room, as judged by the jury, sold for a third less per pound than a coffee that scored lower. See Premiumisation for why bidders behave that way — score sets the floor, reputation and story set the ceiling.
Story
The competition record
Nicaragua’s Cup of Excellence splits its results into two categories — “Washed” and “Natural & Honey” — and crowns a winner in each. Sauceda won the Natural & Honey side in 2025.
As is standard for a winning coffee, the lot was split into an A and a B so more than one buyer could take a share:
| Year | Lot | Score | Weight | Price | Total | Buyer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 1A — honey Geisha | 91.77 | 264.55 lb | $54.80/lb | $14,497.34 | K.V.N. Import Export (1991) Co., Ltd. |
| 2025 | 1B — honey Geisha | 91.77 | 231.45 lb | $56.10/lb | $12,984.35 | Decameron Coffee |
| 2026 | rank 10 — honey Geisha | 87.94 | 396.83 lb | not published in the table consulted | — | — |
496 lb for $27,481.69 in 2025, from a farm ACE records simply as “Elite, Nueva Segovia” (ACE — Nicaragua 2025, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). “Honey” here means the cherry’s skin is stripped off but the sticky fruit layer underneath is left on the bean while it dries — the middle road between washed and natural, explained in full at Honey process.
One small detail links him to the other Nueva Segovia producer on this wiki: K.V.N. Import Export bought the top lot in both categories that year — Sauceda’s 1A and Zavala’s 1A. The same Thai buyer took the head of the washed table and the head of the honey table.
2026 — tenth
The following year Elite entered again, and the result went the other way. At the 2026 competition his honey Geisha placed tenth in the Natural & Honey category at 87.94, with 396.83 lb (ACE — Nicaragua 2026, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). The category was won at 92.00 by a natural Geisha from Los Alpes in Dipilto, and the washed side by Abner Samuel Zavala’s El Cambalache at 91.44.
A drop from first at 91.77 to tenth at 87.94 in one season is not a scandal — it is the ordinary weather of competition coffee. Scores move with rainfall, picking dates, fermentation luck and a different jury. It is also the clearest argument for why repeat placings, like Zavala’s four, are treated as the harder achievement on this wiki.
The cupper
The thing that makes Sauceda unusual among producers is that he is reported to have spent his career on the other side of the cupping table — as a professional taster who grades coffee for a living, rather than only growing it. That claim, and the details of his family background, come from roaster write-ups rather than any official record; see the callouts below.
Why he matters
He is the wiki’s cleanest single-year illustration of score and price coming apart. The Ethiopia and Indonesia rows in Cup of Excellence records by country make the same point across continents — a 91.41 Indonesian lot selling for a tenth of a 90.50 Ethiopian one. Sauceda makes it inside one auction, on one afternoon, judged by one jury: the top score was the fourth-most-expensive coffee on the table.
To verify — a correction: his prices are not 231.45 a pound
An automated research pass feeding this note read the ACE table one column across and reported Sauceda’s lots as selling for 231.45/lb — which would have made them, by a wide margin, the most expensive Nicaraguan coffees ever sold, and would have contradicted the $88.20/lb auction top price already recorded in Cup of Excellence records by country.
Those two numbers are the lot weights in pounds, not the prices. The arithmetic on ACE’s own table settles it: 264.55 lb × 14,497.34**, and 231.45 lb × 12,984.35**, which are exactly the lot totals ACE publishes. The weights are also the standard COE box sizes — 120 kg and 105 kg. Recorded here so the error is not reintroduced.
To verify
Everything about the man himself rests on two roaster pages that are now dead. The research behind this note cited Novo Coffee (a Denver roaster) and Good Karma Coffee (a German roaster) for the following, and both URLs returned HTTP 404 when checked on 2026-07-23, so none of it could be confirmed at the source:
- that he is a professional coffee taster as well as a producer, working as a cupper since 2006, having sat on the national Cup of Excellence jury 15 times and the international jury twice (Good Karma)
- that he is the second generation of a Nicaraguan coffee family, and that he “launched the Finca Elite project” on his family’s existing land (Novo)
- that he also farms Finca Altiplano near Dipilto at 1,650–1,700 m, and that Novo has bought from him since 2018 (Novo)
These are ordinary, plausible trade-page claims, and roasters do rotate seasonal coffees off their sites — a 404 is not evidence the claims are false. But they are single-sourced, commercially interested, and currently unverifiable. State them as “roasters report”, never as fact. No SCA, CQI or Q Grader registry entry for him was found; see Q Grader for what a formal taster credential actually involves.
To verify
No ACE farm directory entry exists for him. For most producers on this wiki the richest primary source is ACE’s own farm directory — the producer’s description of their own land, in their own words. The directory page for score 91.77 returns 404 (checked 2026-07-23), so there is no primary description of Finca Elite, no published altitude, no farm size, and no quote from Sauceda anywhere. Everything on this page comes from results tables.
To verify
The dates printed on ACE’s Nicaragua 2026 page do not match the year. That page shows “International Jury Week: May 11–15, 2025” and “COE Auction: June 25, 2025”, while Nicaragua’s official gazette reports the 2026 awards ceremony on 14 May 2026 and the auction on 29 June 2026 (La Gaceta, accessed 2026-07-23). Almost certainly stale template text on the ACE page. Do not quote a 2026 auction date from ACE.
The 2026 results table as rendered also carries no price or buyer columns — only rank, score, farm, farmer, varietal, process, region and weight. A first pass over that page returned 7,579.45 and a buyer named “Truth Roastery” for the Elite lot; those fields are not in the table’s headers and are not repeated here as fact. Check the 2026 auction page again before quoting any 2026 price.
Related
- Finca Elite — his farm in Mozonte, and the source of both results above
- Abner Samuel Zavala · Finca La Esperanza (Dipilto) · Finca El Cambalache — the other Nueva Segovia family in this competition, and the washed-category winner in both 2025 and 2026
- Sergio Noé Ortez Ortez · Finca El Porvenir (San Fernando) — the producer who placed second behind him in the 2025 Natural & Honey category, at 90.59
- Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition and the body that publishes every number above
- Cup of Excellence records by country — where Nicaragua’s prices sit against everyone else’s
- Ramón Jarquín · Finca Solidaridad — the Matagalpa smallholder at the ordinary end of the same 2025 auction
- Geisha — the variety behind both his results
- Honey process · Natural process · Washed process — the two categories Nicaragua’s competition splits into, and what “honey” actually means
- Coffee scoring · Cupping · Q Grader — what 91.77 means, and what a professional taster’s job is
- Premiumisation — why the highest score was not the highest price
Official links
- (no official website found — Sauceda is a small producer with no farm site or company page of his own; he reaches buyers through the Cup of Excellence auction and through importers, and the two roaster pages that described him are both offline)
- Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Nicaragua 2025 — the primary record of his first place, scores, prices and buyers
- Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Nicaragua 2026 — the primary record of his 2026 tenth place
Sources
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Nicaragua 2025 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Nicaragua 2026 results — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch; no price or buyer columns published)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory entry for 91.77 — accessed 2026-07-23 (HTTP 404 — no directory entry exists for this score)
- La Gaceta (Nicaragua) — Cafés de Nueva Segovia destacan en la XXII edición de la Taza de la Excelencia Nicaragua 2026 — accessed 2026-07-23 (via the existing Abner Samuel Zavala note, which confirmed it via WebFetch)
- Novo Coffee — Olman Sauceda Geshas — accessed 2026-07-23 (HTTP 404; a site search for “sauceda” also returned no results)
- Novo Coffee — Altiplano — accessed 2026-07-23 (HTTP 404)
- Good Karma Coffee — Nicaragua Finca Elite, Gesha Honey, COE Winner 2025 — accessed 2026-07-23 (HTTP 404)