Cup of Excellence: How the Most Important Competition in Specialty Coffee Works

Cup of Excellence: How the Most Important Competition in Specialty Coffee Works

In the world of specialty coffee there are plenty of awards, but only one that everyone mentions when quality comes up: Cup of Excellence. Behind those three letters sits the oldest and most respected competition for specialty coffee. What started in Brazil in 1999 as an experiment has become a movement that searches for beans in eleven countries, cups them blindly, and ends each season with online auctions where individual lots fetch prices that even people in the trade still find hard to believe.

How it all began

The idea took shape in Geneva in 1994. Pablo Dubois and Frans Bolvenkel were working on the Gourmet Coffee Project of the International Coffee Organization and asked themselves how the truly outstanding coffees could be lifted out of the noise. Coffee prices were in the basement at the time, farming families earned almost nothing no matter how good their beans were. The first cupping took place in Lavras, Brazil in 1999 under the name Best of Brazil. From 2000 onwards the competition was renamed Cup of Excellence and has since spread to around eleven producing countries, from Honduras and Colombia to Ethiopia.

Six rounds, one truth

What makes Cup of Excellence unique is not a single tasting day but a whole marathon. Every coffee passes through six separate scoring rounds, all blind. The first three rounds are judged by a national jury of seasoned coffee professionals. Hundreds of lots are submitted. Anything that scores at least 86 points in pre-selection makes it into the top 150. Those 150 get cupped again, the best 90 move on. A final national round narrows the field to 40 coffees.

Then the international judges arrive. Between twenty and twenty-five Q-graders and tasting professionals from around the world fly into the producing country and evaluate the top 40 across three more rounds. The final score decides everything. The top 30 are named National Winners. Anyone who scores at least 87 points in the final round officially wins a Cup of Excellence Award.

What does 87 points actually mean

The Specialty Coffee Association has a clear definition of what specialty coffee is: a coffee that scores at least 80 out of 100 points. That is the entry ticket. 87 points are a different league. At that level you no longer talk about solid quality, you talk about exceptional character. A clean, precise acidity, a long aftertaste, a cup that reveals new facets at every temperature. 90 points and above are extremely rare and live in the world of Geisha varieties and meticulously sorted micro-lot harvests.

The auction and what it really changes

A few weeks after the cupping comes the online auction. Roasters from all over the world bid against each other on the winning lots. The prices are often surprising, sometimes absurd. In 2024 a roaster from Los Angeles paid 445 US dollars per pound for the winning lot of the very first Cup of Excellence in Ethiopia, a naturally processed 74158 from Basha Farm in Sidama. That broke the previous record of 400.50 dollars per pound set in 2022.

What makes those numbers important is where the money goes. Most of the auction revenue goes directly to the farming family that produced the coffee. By 2018, Cup of Excellence had distributed more than 60 million dollars to coffee families in twelve countries. For many small farms that is not just a good year, it is a change in life circumstances. Investments in drying beds, in a small mill of their own, in school for the kids, in the next generation.

What this has to do with your cup

Most Cup of Excellence lots never end up on a supermarket shelf. They are roasted in small batches, by specialty roasters, often in limited weekly releases. Sometimes they show up as limited releases at Swiss specialty roasters, clearly marked with score, processing method, and the farmer's story. When you buy one of those, you know exactly what you are holding: a coffee that one of the strictest juries in the world judged outstanding, and for which the person who grew it was fairly paid.

More than just a sticker

Cup of Excellence is not a marketing label that someone can buy. It is a competition with clear rules, with blind cupping, and with real consequences for the families that have grown coffee for generations. The next time you drink a cup with a COE certificate, you are not just sitting in front of a more expensive coffee. You are sitting in front of a small story about craft, variety choice, processing, drying, sorting, and yes, weather luck too.

At Röstpost

We curate Swiss roasters who work with exceptional beans. Some of them already carry Cup of Excellence lots in their range, others work with farming families that are close to it. On Röstpost you will find specialty coffee from across Switzerland, sorted by flavor, processing method, and origin. Try your way through, get to know beans that have real character.