Ethiopia with Tracon Trading has been named the winner of the Best of the Best Award at the 7th Ernesto Illy International Coffee Awards.
The award was named after the visionary leader of illycaffè and the son of the company’s founder and celebrates the work that the company has been doing for the last 30 years, side-by-side with coffee farmers, to offer sustainable coffee.
illycaffè Chairman Andrea Illy presented the award at Palazzo Colonna in Rome, Italy on 18 November.
The award was assigned by an independent panel of nine experts who examined the best batches from the 2021-2022 harvest through a blind tasting of nine coffees from the nine finalist countries: Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Nicaragua and Rwanda.
Costa Rica’s CoopeAtenas cooperative won the Coffee Lovers’ Choice award assigned by a panel of consumers who blind tasted the coffee samples in illy cafés in Trieste, Milan, Paris, London and San Francisco and ranked their preferences.
The Sala Grande hosted the gala dinner for the event’s 200 guests. Once past the red carpet, guests entered Sala Gialla for photographs and continued to Sala della Cappella, where they discovered the 27 finalists from nine countries competing for the Ernesto Illy International Coffee Award 2022.
They then moved to Sala dei Primitivi to enjoy a performance by the artist Giulia Berardinelli, who painted a canvas with coffee. The event continued at Sala dei Ricami, where guests could immerse themselves in the aromas of the coffees from the nine finalist countries. The event concluded at Sala dell’Apoteosi di Martino V with an exhibition of the nine paintings by nine different artists, each depicting one of the nine paradises of coffee.
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