Pebble Coffee
Pebble Coffee is a small specialty coffee company based in Taipei, Taiwan, which buys green coffee — unroasted beans — and supplies it to Taiwanese roasters and cafés.1
It appears in this wiki for one specific reason, and it is a reason worth pausing on. When the 2024 Best of Panama auction produced the most expensive coffee in the world at the time, the published buyer list did not read “Pebble Coffee.” It read “Pebble Coffee for Simple Kaffa” — the only entry on that list that names two companies.23 Pebble was buying as an agent, not for itself.
That phrasing is the whole point of this note. Most of the roasters on a record-auction buyer sheet are the ones who will eventually sell you the cup. An importer is the invisible layer underneath: the company that handles the bidding, the paperwork, the shipping and the customs, so that a café can end up with two kilos of the world’s most expensive coffee without ever dealing with an auction in Panama.
The company
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Base | Taipei, Taiwan |
| Business | Green coffee importing, plus small-batch roasting |
| Named in | 2024 Best of Panama record-lot buyer list, as agent for Simple Kaffa |
| Best documented score | 91 points from Coffee Review, Tanzania Shiwanda Estate Peaberry, May 20141 |
The Taipei base is confirmed at a source that actually tasted the coffee: Coffee Review, the long-running American cupping-review publication, files Pebble Coffee’s location as Taipei, Taiwan and describes it in its own words as “a specialty micro-roaster located Taipei, Taiwan that focuses on high-end coffees.”1
“Micro-roaster” and “green coffee importer” are not the same job, and Pebble seems to do both — a common arrangement at this scale. A company that imports green coffee for other people’s roasteries will often roast a little of it under its own name too, because roasting your own samples is how you sell green coffee in the first place.
To verify
The Chinese name, the legal entity and the address are all from search listings, not from the source. Aggregated search results give the Chinese name as 圓石咖啡, a registered entity as Pebble Coffee Co., Ltd. / 圓石國際有限公司, and a street address on Lane 127, Section 1, Anhe Road, Da’an District, Taipei. Directory snippets also carry a self-description as a “Taiwan-based boutique green coffee importer, focusing on Quality | Sustainability | Traceability” on the company’s own Facebook and LinkedIn pages. None of those pages were reached directly here — and Facebook and LinkedIn repeating the same sentence is one source (the company), not two. Treat the name, the entity and the address as unconfirmed. The company’s own website at pebblecoffee.com would not load on repeated attempts, so the only presence confirmed reachable is its social profiles; the email address info@pebblecoffee.com does appear on Coffee Review’s own review pages.1
The 2024 Best of Panama record lot
At the Best of Panama auction on 7 August 2024, the winning Elida Geisha Natural “Torre” from Elida Estate — the Lamastus family farm in Boquete — sold at 10,013 per kilogram**: 20 kg for **200,260, a world record at the time.2
No one company paid that. Saza Coffee of Japan fronted the bid and then split the lot. The buyer list, quoted verbatim from the Panama write-up, runs:
“Saza Coffee (Japan), Grand Cru Coffee (China), OKLAO SPECIALTY COFFEE, BREW BOYY CREW, Ruber.Roastery(Korea), Pebble Coffee for Simple Kaffa, Paradise Coffee Roasters, and Ruliweb from South Korea”2
| Year | Auction | Lot | Price | Pebble Coffee’s role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Best of Panama | Elida Geisha Natural “Torre” (20 kg) | 10,013/kg (≈ 4,542/lb) | Named co-buyer, bidding for Simple Kaffa; lot fronted by Saza Coffee |
Two things follow, and both matter for reading the rest of this wiki.
First, this is a buying consortium — eight names splitting one 20 kg bag and one bill. Being on the list does not mean Pebble paid $200,260, or anything close to it. Its share, and what it paid, are not published anywhere.
Second, the geography suddenly makes sense. Simple Kaffa is the Taipei roastery built around Berg Wu’s 2016 World Barista Championship win. Pebble Coffee is also in Taipei. A Taipei café wanting a slice of a Panamanian record lot going under the hammer alongside Japanese, Korean and Hong Kong bidders is exactly the situation a local green-coffee importer exists to solve.
To verify
The agency relationship is implied by the phrasing, not stated by either company. “Pebble Coffee for Simple Kaffa” strongly reads as importer bidding on behalf of a roaster, and the shared Taipei base supports it — but neither Pebble Coffee nor Simple Kaffa has been found confirming the arrangement in its own words, and no source consulted spells out who paid, who took delivery, or how the kilos were divided. The reading here is an inference from a buyer list and two addresses in the same city.
To verify
The buyer list itself has no official version. Best of Panama’s own buyer tables for 2024 are not publicly browsable. The list above circulates through news coverage — a Panama property-and-lifestyle site,2 Food & Wine,3 and the trade outlet CoffeeTalk4 all publish the same names in the same order, which suggests a single underlying auction communication rather than three independent counts. Other coverage of the same record, such as LatAm Reports, names only Saza Coffee. This is a step up from the single-source caution recorded earlier on the Simple Kaffa and Grand Cru Coffee notes — but it is still not a primary auction record.
What it actually buys
The clearest independent window onto Pebble’s coffee is Coffee Review, which has been publishing blind-scored reviews of its lots on and off for over a decade. The one review confirmed in full here is a Tanzania Shiwanda Estate Peaberry from the Mbeya region of southern Tanzania, reviewed in May 2014, roasted medium-dark, priced at $9.00 per 6 ounces, and scored 91 points.1 The blind assessment reads: “Sweet, balanced, gently deep. Caramel, walnut, raisin, flowers, coriander in aroma and cup. Juicy, gently lush acidity; light, silky mouthfeel.”1
A word on two terms in that sentence. Peaberry means a coffee cherry produced one round bean instead of the usual two flat ones — a natural variation that gets sorted out and sold separately, and one that Tanzania is especially associated with. 91 points is on the 100-point scale used across specialty coffee, where roughly 90 and above marks the top tier; see Cupping for how the tasting itself is run.
Ninety-one points for a Tanzanian peaberry is a useful signal about what kind of buyer this is. It is not a Geisha-only trophy hunter. The buying looks like the ordinary work of a good importer — sourcing across Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia — with the occasional record-lot appearance sitting on top of it.
To verify
A recent Coffee Review record, and a Top 50 placing, that could not be opened here. Coffee Review’s search listing returns a run of Pebble Coffee entries from 2019 through 2026 — washed and natural Ethiopian lots from Guji, Sidama, Limu and Yirgacheffe, Kenyan Kiambu peaberries, and a Sumatra Mandheling espresso — including one, an Ethiopia Washed Guji Bishala G1, listed as ranking #3 on Coffee Review’s Top 50 Coffees of 2025. The individual review pages and the ranking page were not fetched, no scores were visible in the listing, and a Coffee Review “top coffees” page reached here turned out to be the 2013 edition, which does not include Pebble. Do not state the #3 placing or any of those scores as fact until the ranking page itself is read.
Why a green-coffee importer belongs in this wiki
Record coffee prices are usually reported as though one buyer walked in with a cheque. The 2024 lot shows what actually happens: a Japanese roaster organises the bid, seven others take slices, and at least one of those slices is held by a company that will never sell a cup of it to anybody.
That is the layer this note documents. Grand Cru Coffee sells its share in 80-gram boxes; Saza Coffee pours its at ¥3,000 a cup; Klatch Coffee famously priced it by the shot. Pebble Coffee does none of that — it moves the beans and hands them on. See Coffee supply chain for where importers sit between farm and café, Green coffee buying for how the buying decisions get made, and Buying consortium for the arrangement that put eight names on one bag.
Related
- Simple Kaffa — the Taipei roastery Pebble bid for · Berg Wu · Saza Coffee — lead buyer of the same lot · Grand Cru Coffee · Klatch Coffee · Julith Coffee · JD.com
- Best of Panama · Best of Panama results archive · Elida Estate · Wilford Lamastus · Geisha · Natural process
- Buying consortium · Green coffee buying · Coffee supply chain · Green coffee auctions · Direct trade
- Coffee scoring · Cupping · Peaberry · Q Grader
- Premiumisation · China coffee market · World Barista Championship
Official links
- Official — Pebble Coffee on Facebook
- (the company’s own site at pebblecoffee.com did not respond when fetched — see the To-verify note above)
Footnotes
-
Coffee Review — Tanzania Shiwanda Estate Peaberry, Pebble Coffee (91 points, May 2014) ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
-
Casa Solution — $4,500 a pound for Boquete coffee? Yes, really (2024 buyer list) ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
-
Food & Wine — the most expensive coffee beans in the world come from Panama ↩ ↩2
-
CoffeeTalk — This coffee just set a new world record, selling at $10,013 per kilogram ↩