What is the Cup of Excellence Brazil?
If you follow specialty coffee at any depth, you have seen the abbreviation. CoE. It appears on coffee bags, on green coffee listings, on the social media of roasters who have paid extraordinary prices to secure a lot that almost no one else can source. It carries weight in a way that very few quality designations do.
The Cup of Excellence is widely regarded as the most rigorous and prestigious coffee competition in the world. And it started — not in Ethiopia, not in Colombia, not in any of the origins more commonly associated with specialty coffee's origin story — but in Brazil.
Understanding what the Cup of Excellence is, how it works, and what it means for the coffee that passes through it is essential context for any roaster serious about specialty green coffee. This post covers all of it — and explains why, for Orange Brown Imports, the competition has a particular personal significance.
The origin story — born in Brazil in 1999
The Cup of Excellence was founded in Brazil in 1999 as part of a broader initiative to transform how Brazilian coffee was perceived and valued on the global market. The program was initially funded by the World Trade Office, the Common Fund for Commodities, and the International Coffee Organization, and brought together a remarkable founding team: Marcelo Vieira of the Brazilian Specialty Coffee Association (BSCA), quality specialist Silvio Leite, Susie Spindler, Hidetaka Hayashi of Hayashi Coffee Company in Japan, George Howell of George Howell Coffee, and Don Holly of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.
The timing was deliberate. Brazil had long been the world's largest coffee producer — but its reputation was built on volume and reliability, not on the kind of exceptional, terroir-specific quality that commanded premium prices on the international specialty market. The founders recognised that quality was key, and that a competition would encourage producers to focus on quality over quantity.
The first edition was originally called "The Best of Brazil." It introduced something that had never existed in coffee before: a rigorous, multi-stage blind evaluation process followed by an online auction — also a first for the industry — that allowed international buyers to bid directly on the competition-winning lots. The combination of transparent quality assessment and market-driven pricing was revolutionary.
In 2002, management of the program was transferred to the newly formed Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE), a non-profit organisation created specifically to oversee the competition and expand it to other producing countries. Today the Cup of Excellence runs in sixteen countries. Brazil, where it all began, remains the anchor of the programme — hosting its 26th edition in 2025.
How the Cup of Excellence works — the full process
The Cup of Excellence is not a tasting panel or a trade show award. It is a sustained, multi-stage elimination process that takes months and involves hundreds of coffees, two separate juries, and multiple blind cupping rounds. Here is how it works from submission to auction.
Submission Producers from across Brazil submit coffee lots for consideration. In 2025, 392 samples were submitted. Each submitted lot is assigned a blind code known only to the auditor — no judge at any stage of the competition knows whose coffee they are evaluating.
National jury — first and second rounds A national jury of qualified Brazilian cuppers evaluates every submitted lot. In the first round, they cup all submissions blind and select those scoring above a threshold — typically 84 points or above — to advance. In 2025, the national jury selected 151 samples from the initial 392 to proceed to the second round, where the field was cut again to 40 samples.
International jury The 40 remaining samples are evaluated by an international jury — a team of experienced specialty coffee buyers, roasters, and Q graders from around the world. In 2025, 27 judges from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Europe, and the United States participated. The international jury cups each coffee multiple times across several days, scoring blind on the official Cup of Excellence cupping form. Every winning coffee is cupped a minimum of five times across the full competition process.
Scoring thresholds and categories Since 2022, the Brazil Cup of Excellence has run three categories: Experimental (coffees with controlled fermentation), Natural/Dry (sun-dried and naturally processed coffees), and Wet Process (pulped, de-mucilaged, and hulled coffees). Within each category:
- Coffees scoring 87 points and above from the international jury earn the Cup of Excellence designation and proceed to the international auction
- Coffees scoring 85–86.99 points earn National Winner status — a significant recognition, awarded by a combined panel
- The top-scoring coffees in each category are celebrated at an awards ceremony held in Brazil with all the producers present
The auction The winning lots are packaged in 30kg boxes containing two 15kg vacuum-packed bags and offered in an online auction open to ACE members worldwide. Buyers bid competitively for the right to purchase each lot — and Cup of Excellence lots routinely sell at many multiples of the commodity green coffee price. For a farmer whose coffee has won first place, the auction result can be financially transformational.
What a Cup of Excellence score actually means
Scores in the Cup of Excellence carry a weight that scores from other evaluations do not — because of the rigour of the process behind them. A coffee that scores 90+ at the Cup of Excellence has been:
- Evaluated blind, with no knowledge of the producer or farm
- Cupped at least five times across two separate jury rounds
- Assessed by both national experts and an international panel from multiple countries and coffee cultures
- Scored using a standardised evaluation protocol aligned with SCA cupping standards
When a coffee achieves 90+ points at the Cup of Excellence, it is not a marketing claim. It is a verified, reproducible quality benchmark that the entire specialty coffee industry recognises.
Why Cerrado Mineiro dominates the competition
Among the many regions that produce Cup of Excellence-winning coffees in Brazil, Cerrado Mineiro — Brazil's first Denomination of Origin region — has produced a disproportionate share of the competition's most celebrated results.
The reasons are agronomic. Cerrado Mineiro's well-defined seasons — a dry winter that concentrates sugars in the cherry and enables controlled, even drying — combined with altitudes reaching 1,350 metres and soils transformed through decades of precision agronomic work, create growing and post-harvest conditions that are exceptionally well-suited to producing the kind of clean, consistent, high-scoring lots that Cup of Excellence juries reward.
The region's producers have also developed a culture of quality competition that spans decades. The investment in processing infrastructure, the willingness to experiment with varietals and fermentation, and the generation-to-generation transmission of farming knowledge across Cerrado Mineiro's family farms have collectively produced a concentration of specialty excellence that shows up year after year in the competition results.
Our connection to the competition
Orange Brown Imports sources directly from farms in the Cerrado Mineiro region — and among the farms in our network are producers with a track record in the Cup of Excellence Brazil that is, by any measure, exceptional.
In 2021, a producer from Fazenda Cachoeira in Carmo do Paranaíba, Cerrado Mineiro, won first place in the Cup of Excellence Brazil — the highest score of any coffee in the entire competition that year, with a Yellow Catuaí lot that achieved 90.5 points from the international jury. In 2024, the same family's coffee from Fazenda Sobrado e Bonito de Cima achieved the highest score in the Wet Process category with 91.93 points — placing them among the top results of the entire 25th-anniversary edition.
Winning the Cup of Excellence Brazil once is a remarkable achievement. Producing top-scoring lots across multiple editions, across different farms and processing methods, is something else entirely — it is a demonstration of consistent, repeatable quality that goes beyond a single exceptional harvest.
We do not name the farms we source from as a matter of principle — our farmers' relationships and competitive intelligence are theirs to share, not ours. But for roasters who source Cerrado Mineiro green coffee through Orange Brown Imports, the connection to this level of competition pedigree is real, direct, and backed by the kind of farm relationships that are only possible when a team has been visiting, cupping, and building trust at origin for years.
What this means for roasters sourcing Brazilian green coffee
The Cup of Excellence matters to roasters for three interconnected reasons.
It is the clearest quality signal in the market. In a category full of inflated scores and marketing-led quality claims, a Cup of Excellence result is independently verified and globally respected. Knowing that farms in your importer's network compete and win at that level tells you something real about the baseline quality of what you are sourcing — even when you are buying a standard lot rather than an auction lot.
It reflects the broader quality culture of a region. A farm that invests in Cup of Excellence-level quality — the processing precision, the varietal selection, the post-harvest attention — does not apply that investment only to competition lots. It applies it to every lot it produces. The quality culture is farm-wide. Sourcing from farms embedded in that culture is one of the most reliable ways to access consistently exceptional green coffee.
It connects your supply chain to a verified story. As a roaster, being able to point to the farms and regions behind your Brazilian coffee — and knowing that those farms have competed and won at the world's most rigorous coffee competition — is a supply chain story worth telling. Not as a marketing headline, but as a genuine indicator of where your sourcing sits in the quality spectrum.
The Cup of Excellence Brazil in 2025
The 2025 Cup of Excellence Brazil continued the competition's evolution, marking the programme's 26th year in the country where it was founded. Three categories were evaluated — Experimental, Natural, and Wet Process — with ten winners selected from each category after assessment by 27 international judges.
For the first time in 2025, a Brazilian producer was elected to the Legends of Excellence designation — an elite recognition awarded to producers who have demonstrated exceptional quality across multiple Cup of Excellence wins over the years. The inaugural Brazilian Legends recipient had accumulated an extraordinary competition record — a testament to what is possible when agronomic excellence, processing innovation, and long-term commitment to quality converge on a single farm.
The competition continues to drive Brazilian specialty coffee forward — pushing producers to invest in quality, roasters to pay attention to origin, and the global market to understand that Brazil is not just the world's largest coffee producer. It is home to some of the world's finest.
Source Cerrado Mineiro green coffee through Orange Brown Imports
If you are building or strengthening a Brazilian green coffee programme and want access to the regions and farms that have made the Cup of Excellence their benchmark, we would like to talk.
Our team is based in both Brazil and Canada — with members on the ground in Brazil year-round, visiting the farms in our network and maintaining the direct relationships that make genuine traceability possible. We source Cerrado Mineiro green coffee through both custom sourcing and direct farm brokering, depending on what works best for your roastery.