Brazil Cup of Excellence registers record price

In an auction where all of the lots were sold within eight minutes of the opening bid, Gabriel Nunes received almost US$100,000 for 793 pounds of coffee and now holds the all-time record for a Cup of Excellence price. Two groups of bidders from several countries will share the top coffee. Maruyama Coffee, Campos Coffee, Sarutahiko Coffee, Times Club Coffee, Proud Mary, and Coffee Libre outbid their rivals for the chance to own the winning lot from Fazenda Bom Jardim. This lot is unique not only in the location of the farm- Patrocinio- but that it had scored a whopping 92.3 points by the international jury due to its unusual flavour characteristics. Nunes, 28 years old and the third generation of the coffee family explains, “In the past we produced volume; today we balance the social, environmental and financial pillars of our farm. Planting is about ensuring quality, making the correct soil management in order to reduce the use of inputs, having environmental awareness and also understanding what the marketplace seeks. Nunes coffee farms are in a privileged region, with ideal altitude and little rainfall during the harvest. We continue to invest in technology, improve handling and also to experiment with some controlled fermentations to improve our coffees.” The winning coffee was indeed an experimental process and Nunes, a recent agronomy graduate chose a yellow bourbon-pulped raisin process for the competition. He describes how the coffee lot was created, “At the ideal point of maturation, we harvested the best cherries by hand, put them inside a truck bucket and let the truck rest in a local forest to cool down for 36 hours, achieving anaerobic fermentation. After that we pulped the fermented raisins and dried them on raised beds.” “This is an extraordinary result for Brazil and for our producers who work so hard and have been focused on quality improvement for many years,” said Vanusia Nogueira, Executive Director of The Brazil Specialty Coffee Association. “We are thrilled to offer these fantastic coffees to the world and we thank those who had the vision to create Cup of Excellence in Brazil with the Gourmet Project so many years ago.” Cup of Excellence was founded in Brazil in 1999 and now showcases many other countries best coffees as well as Brazil. This was the 18th auction celebrating Brazil’s best coffees. This auction not only broke the previous average record of $8.96 per pound for their Pulped Natural coffees but with an average of $12. 75 per pound. broke the record of $12.47 per pound for the Naturals. The winning Naturals will be auctioned next week on December 7th. All but five of the lots received at least $8.00 per pound, which is multiple times higher than average specialty prices. The top 90 scoring coffees were split into two lots for the auction. All of the 24 auctioned coffees had scored at least 86 points by both the national and international juries.