Cup of Excellence

What do you get when you have more than 300 entries and an average of 9,000 cups of coffee analysed? Well aside from a giant caffeine hangover, you get what is known as the Cup of Excellence.   

Cup of Excellence is considered the most prestigious competition for high quality coffee. Each year thousands of coffees are submitted for judging with the intention to receive the winning prize of a global online auction of their coffee.

Inside the specialty coffee industry, this three week, rigorous, cupping evaluation process scrutinises each cup of coffee. The process is split up across the weeks. First a National Jury of around a dozen qualified jurors from the origin country taste the coffee before being passed on to an International Jury, comprised of approximately 20-25 experienced jurors from around the world.

The competition has pioneered a sense of trust, integrity and transparency for the coffee industry with each lot of entries being heavily documented and then assigned to a blind jury. In the specialty coffee industry, the cup of coffee ranked number 1 is regarded as the single best quality coffee in the country for that particular year, ultimately boosting the award-winning batches to achieve 50 times the market price at auction.

For farmers, this is a life changing moment, providing them with support and positive reinforcement for the high quality work they do as well as a direct link to the international buying market.