Cupping the World in 2018

by

Editorial Policy

Published on

Last updated on

PORTLAND—After a year of traveling around the world, tasting thousands of coffees, and setting multiple auction records, the Cup of Excellence program culminated in an intimate showcase cupping of all the program’s top-graded coffees from each competing country. Held on Saturday, December 1, this was the second year that the organization held its Cupping the World event at the Alliance for Coffee Excellence headquarters in Portland, Oregon.

The evening began with Darrin Daniel, ACE’s Executive Director, welcoming guests to join him in a blind tasting of the 12 different winning coffees from the 2018 Cup of Excellence competitions: Brazil Natural & Pulped Natural, Colombia, Peru, Burundi, Rwanda, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. Each cup placed on the table had only an envelope with a random three-digit number next to it for identification.

The roughly 30 guests of coffee buyers, baristas, and enthusiasts alike queued up to methodically make their way down the line of coffees, taking in the aromatic grinds, stopping often to marvel at a powerfully fragrant cup or discuss their own hypothesis of where the beans originated. Once tasting commenced, the room was filled with the sounds of slurping, frequent praise for certain cups, and further dissection of each cup, hypothesizing its every detail.

After half an hour of repeatedly going through the line, everyone put down their spoons for the reveal of where each coffee had originated from and its specs. Daniel first opened the floor to Erin Wang, Cup of Excellence’s new Senior Manager who stepped into the role this year and acted as head judge for seven of the 12 competitions. Wang detailed her experiences of the last year, how each competition serves as research into the country and reveals national and international trends. Some of those trends and insights she shared were that more Geshas were entered into and won competitions this year than ever before, Nicaragua’s farmers are struggling in the current political upheaval, and this year resulted in some of the highest prices ever paid in the competition’s history.

The first reveal of the evening was cup #534, a coffee that the room came to a consensus was the best of everything on the table. The coffee was a Pulped Natural Gesha from Chapada de Minas in Brazil, which had the highest competition score of all the coffees that year at 93.89. Guests wrapped up the event with a catered reception with food from Proud Mary Coffee and talks to prepare for 2019’s schedule.

Share This Article

Jordan Johnson

Join 7,000+ coffee pros and get top stories, deals, and other industry goodies in your inbox each week.


Other Articles You May Like

A New Chapter for Taza Presidencial, A Bolivian-Born Coffee Quality Competition

Quality-focused competitions have fueled coffee improvements in Bolivia. But when government funding ran out for Taza Presidencial, local coffee professionals made sure the competition stayed alive.
by Sandra Elisa Loofbourow | September 8, 2023

Direct Trade via Direct Message: How Instagram is Facilitating a New Kind of Coffee Connection

One morning in 2022, I walked into work to find an envelope of green coffee samples from a source I wasn’t familiar with. My boss told me they came from a Costa Rican coffee…
by Fionn Pooler | August 30, 2023

A Look at the Future of Fine Robusta Through Vietnamese Specialty Coffee

For years, Robusta has gotten a bad rep, but people are beginning to reconsider its potential. Vietnam may already have the blueprint for the future of Robusta.
by Mikey Rinaldo | August 11, 2023

In India, Black Baza Champions Sustainability and Smallholder Farmers

Black Baza Coffee aims to support smallholder coffee farmers pursuing biodiversity on their farms while guaranteeing them a fair price for their crops.
by Sohel Sarkar | July 12, 2023