What is the Cup of Excellence?

Cup of Excellence (COE) is the most rigorous international green-coffee quality competition, launched in 1999 in Brazil and now run by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence. Winning lots — all blind-scored above 86 points by an international jury — are then auctioned online, often at record-setting prices that flow directly back to the farmers.

Cup of Excellence was created in 1999 under the 'Gourmet Coffee Project', a joint initiative between the International Coffee Organization (ICO), the United Nations and a circle of coffee experts, with American specialty figure George Howell among the key drivers. Brazil hosted the inaugural edition. Since then, the programme has expanded to more than a dozen producing countries: Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Rwanda, Burundi, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Indonesia. The umbrella organisation is the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE), a non-profit based in Portland, Oregon.

The protocol is unusually strict. Each national edition receives hundreds of entries. A first round of national cupping cuts anything below 85 points. Surviving lots are then re-evaluated blind by an international jury of roughly 20-25 Q-graders and expert tasters across several rounds — usually four to five passes. Only lots that hold a score ≥ 86 points earn the Cup of Excellence seal; lots scoring ≥ 90 points receive a Presidential Award. At the close of the competition, the lots are auctioned online on the ACE platform, where roasters worldwide bid. Prices routinely clear 50-100 USD per pound, and exceptional lots have exceeded 300 USD/lb (a Colombian Gesha hit 601 USD/lb at a 2022 auction, a record at the time).

The farmer impact is well documented: a COE windfall can equal several years of normal farm income, and a winning estate sees lasting gains in land value and commercial recognition. For roasters, buying a COE lot guarantees exceptional quality, notarised traceability and a story worth telling the drinker. A surprising fact: unlike other competitions, COE forbids producer identity during jury sessions — Q-graders score strictly blind, purely on sensory profile, which eliminates any reputation bias.

In Europe, several Belgian and Dutch roasters are regular COE bidders, which is how cups scoring well above 88 points reach specialty bars in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp or Liège. A COE lot is typically offered as a limited single-origin microlot, ground for filter, and served as V60 or Chemex to let the terroir speak.

Cup of Excellence — competition structure

The auction dynamic that changed how quality is priced

The Cup of Excellence auction model, piloted in Brazil in 1999 and now operating across 11 countries, created a mechanism for translating exceptional quality into exceptional prices through a transparent, competitive auction. Before CoE, even very high-quality specialty coffee was priced through opaque negotiations between exporters and importers, with producers receiving little direct feedback about how their coffee was valued in consuming markets. The CoE public auction — where international buyers bid openly on named farms' specific lots — made quality pricing transparent for the first time, creating a market signal that directly informed producers about which quality characteristics attracted premiums.

The competition process is more rigorous than most food quality competitions. Coffees progress through three cupping rounds: a national pre-selection, a national jury round (entirely composed of the producing country's trained cuppers), and a final international jury round where certified Q Graders from buying countries evaluate the finalists blind. Only coffees scoring 87 or above on the SCA scale pass the final round and qualify for auction. In strong competition years, this threshold eliminates 80–90% of submitted coffees. The final auction typically includes 20–40 lots, and the top-scoring lots are typically bid to prices well above €20/kg — sometimes exceeding €100/kg for exceptional years.

Going deeper

CoE's educational value extends beyond the auction itself. The detailed scoring sheets from each round, published publicly for every competing coffee, create one of the most comprehensive publicly available databases of professional coffee quality assessments in the world. Researchers, roasters and quality professionals studying what sensory characteristics correlate with high scores can mine this data to understand how training, altitude, variety, and processing affect cup quality across origins. For specialty coffee consumers, the CoE database provides verified reference points — buying a CoE-winning coffee from a specific farm in a specific year is as close to quality-verified provenance as the industry currently offers.