Five coffees scoring 90+ points are among the 40 winners of the third Ethiopia Cup of Excellence coffee competition, with coffees heading to an online auction on Tuesday, Aug. 23.
The competition was produced by the United States-based nonprofit Alliance for Coffee Excellence along with the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority in collaboration with private Ethiopian coffee associations.
This year, green coffee submissions were limited to coffee producers with farms of less than 20 hectares in order to ensure the program benefits smallholder coffee producers.
“The success of the competition is a result of the hard work and commitment of the steering committee, regional and federal level stakeholders and experts and most importantly the participant producers,” Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority Deputy Director General Ato Shafi Omer said in an announcement of the results. “I would like to congratulate all the winners who have done an incredible job by entering the best quality coffees that our country has to offer.”
The program received financial support from a U.S. subsidiary of the private international development group Palladium, and has been supported by USAID’s Feed the Future Ethiopia Value Chain Activity.
In last year’s Ethiopia Cup of Excellence auction, more than 56,000 pounds of coffee were sold, with an average high bid of just over $32 USD per winning lot for a total value of more than $1.8 million. The top-scoring lot in that auction earned $150 per pound from a consortium of buyers.
The top coffee in the 2022 auction came from producer Legesse Botasa Dikale whose sun-dried, natural-process coffee from the Sidama region scored 90.69, according to an international panel of expert judges.
All 40 CoE-winning coffees will be headed to the Aug. 23 auction. A separate auction of “National Winners,” featuring coffees that scored between 86.41 and 87.32, will run from Aug 15-27.