Blog
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Guatemala COE 2012 |
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Filed under In the Cupping Room
The auction for the 2012 Guatemalan Cup of Excellence is tonight, and we're pretty excited to be a part of it!
Last year Fleur and I were lucky enough to judge in the Guatemalan Cup of Excellence competition at the wonderful Ana Cafe facility in Guatemala City. This year, while we haven't quite made it all the way to the judging for the competition, we have been having a great time tasting the fresh crops from farms we got to know from last year. There were only 23 lots that were awarded Cup of Excellence, compared to 29, which usually means the average price will be higher for this year compared to last year.
It was great to see Santa Isabel do so well this year, we bought some of this lot last year when it ranked #8 with a score of 87.69. This is year it's great to see that it ranked much higher to rank #3 at 88.66.
The fabulous farm El Injerto came back to rank #1 this year, just squeezing past the very interested #1 from 2011, El Socorro y Anexos. These two farms submitted very interesting coffees both this year and last year, El Injerto selected a Pacamara lot, and El Socorro chose their Maracaturra lot.
Another farm we've bought from in the past, San Julian, also did very well coming in at rank #16 this year moving up from #18, but only scoring marginally higher.
We're also very excited to see Santa Clara y Anexos (Santa Clara and its annexes) win Cup of Excellence this year. This year will be the fourth crop of this coffee we've bought, and we have been loving the lot that Ricardo put aside for the COE. Santa Clara came in at rank #6, very impressively scoring 88.22. Fleur and I visited this farm last year before the Cup of Excellence competition, and you can see some photos of our trip up here on Flickr.
Sadly Los Cuxinales suffered a very large theft and had to withdrawn from the competition. There was a break-in, and the thieves stole coffee resting in their warehouse on the farm. This sort of theft is devastating for producers, as their entire years income could be taken in one go. The very high C price last year (around $3/lb, or $6.60/kg) sparked these kinds of thefts in Guatemala and Honduras, and is affecting many producers.
The lovely Doris from Ana Cafe has just email us a link to this fabulous map of Guatemala showing where the Cup of Excellence winning farms are located in Guatemala.
