Ramón Jarquín
Ramón Jarquín — listed in the official results as José Ramón Jarquín — is a Nicaraguan coffee farmer in Matagalpa whose lot took second place among the washed coffees at the 2025 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence, scoring 90.50 points and selling at auction for $14.00 a pound.1
He is in this wiki for the opposite reason to most producers here. Nothing about his coffee broke a record — his lot was not even the most expensive one at his own auction. What makes it worth writing down is the size of the jump: before the competition he was selling to middlemen at around $1.50 a pound, so the auction paid him roughly ten times his usual price for the same harvest.2
Story
The 2025 competition
The Cup of Excellence is a national competition run by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence: farmers send in lots, juries taste them blind over several rounds, and the winners are sold in a single public online auction. Nicaragua’s 2025 edition was judged during jury week, 5–9 May 2025, and the auction ran on 19 June 2025. Thirty lots won — fifteen washed and fifteen natural or honey processed — totalling 20,106 lb of coffee and $367,380.19, a weighted average of about $18.27/lb.
Jarquín’s entry, in the washed category:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Rank | 2 (washed) |
| Score | 90.50 (see Coffee scoring) |
| Farm | [[Finca Solidaridad |
| Region | Matagalpa |
| Variety | Maracaturra |
| Process | Washed |
| Weight | 2,553.99 lb |
| Price | $14.00/lb |
| Total | $35,755.86 |
All figures from the official ACE results table. The lot went to a buying consortium of nine roasters rather than one bidder: Dabov Specialty Coffee, Ryans Coffee, Roots by Earth, Savaya Coffee, Supremo Coffee, Mogipoground, Citric meets Malic, Mage Coffee and Smoky Shark Coffee. Groups of small roasters splitting one lot is normal at the lower-priced end of a COE auction, where the lot is too big for any one of them to take alone.
Two details are worth pulling out. His lot was 2,554 lb — by far the largest in the top ranks, more than ten times the weight of the two lots that beat him on score. And the coffee was Maracaturra, a large-beaned Nicaraguan cross, not Geisha; both the first-place washed lot (La Esperanza, Abner Samuel Zavala, Nueva Segovia, 90.73) and the first-place natural (Elite, Olman Uriel Sauceda Chávez, Nueva Segovia, 91.77) were Geisha.
The washed winner is worth a second look, because it puts a number on how little a score explains. Zavala beat Jarquín by 0.23 points — and his two lots sold at $64.40 and $66.00 a pound against Jarquín’s $14.00. A quarter of a point, and a $52 difference per pound. What separated them was Geisha against Maracaturra, and 357 lb against 2,554 lb.
Why $14 a pound is the story
The highest price at that same auction was $88.20/lb, for a washed lot called Los Alpes from Inversiones Valladarez Acevedo S.A.; the lowest was $9.00/lb. Jarquín’s $14.00 sits near the bottom of that spread, and it is nowhere near the numbers on Cup of Excellence records by country.
It still changed his year. At $1.50/lb through intermediaries, 2,554 lb would have brought him a little under $4,000; the auction brought $35,755.86. Qahwa World reports that he had been carrying his coffee two kilometres on his back, and that the auction proceeds paid for medical treatment for his young daughter, who then returned to school.
This is the argument for competitions like COE that has nothing to do with record headlines: the auction is a price-discovery event, and for a farmer previously selling into an anonymous middleman chain, simply being named and scored is what unlocks the multiple. See Premiumisation for the other half of that story — why the very top prices climb the way they do, and why they are not a market rate for anyone.
To verify
“El Porvenir” is probably not his farm. Qahwa World describes him as “a coffee producer from El Porvenir, Nicaragua”, and an earlier version of Cup of Excellence records by country in this wiki repeated that as his farm. The official ACE table gives his farm as Solidaridad, in Matagalpa — and lists four separate farms named El Porvenir in the same 2025 competition, belonging to Sergio Noé Ortez Ortez, Martha Margarita Marín Rodríguez, Pedro Monzón Castilblanco and Claudia María Rivera Siles, none of them Jarquín. “El Porvenir” is a very common Nicaraguan place and farm name. Qahwa’s phrasing most likely refers to a community he comes from, not his farm; it may also simply be a mix-up with one of the other entrants. Do not describe El Porvenir as his farm.
To verify
$14 or $15 a pound. The ACE results table gives $14.00/lb; Qahwa World says $15 per pound. ACE is the primary record and is the figure used above. The $1.50/lb he previously received, and the “ten times” framing, come only from Qahwa World and are not in any primary document.
To verify
Everything personal. His daughter’s illness, the two-kilometre carry, and the detail that the money paid for her treatment all rest on a single secondary source with no named reporter. Nothing was found to corroborate them independently. No birth year, farm size, altitude, family history or earlier competition results for Jarquín appear in any source consulted here.
To verify
His full name. ACE records the producer as “Jose Ramon Jarquin” (unaccented, as the table is typed); Qahwa World calls him Ramón Jarquín. Two European roasters who bought a share of his lot give a third, longer form — José Ramón Jarquín Gómez. Spanish naming convention carries both parents’ surnames, so the longer form is plausibly his legal name — but it appears only on retailer pages, not in any primary document, and no source gives his own preferred spelling.
Related
- Finca Solidaridad — his farm, and what little is known about the land itself
- Cup of Excellence — the competition and auction he placed in
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the organization that runs it and publishes the results table
- Cup of Excellence records by country — where Nicaragua’s numbers sit against everyone else’s
- Basha Bekele — the other smallholder in this wiki, and the opposite extreme of the same auction system
- Coffee scoring · Cupping — what a 90.50 means and how it is arrived at
- Premiumisation — why auction prices and farmgate prices are such different things
- Buying consortium — the nine-roaster group that bought his lot, and why groups form at both ends of the price range
- Geisha — the variety that won the lots above his
- Abner Samuel Zavala · Finca La Esperanza (Dipilto) — the producer and farm that beat him by 0.23 points and sold for $52 a pound more
Official links
- (no official website found — Ramón Jarquín is a smallholder producer with no company site or public presence of his own)
- Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Nicaragua 2025 — the primary record of his placement, lot and price