The Best of Panama auction resolved final week, and a “a crater of coffee shouldn’t cost $3” throng might wish to stop reading here (or, y’know, stop holding such a slight perspective of such a wide-ranging product). The tip offered of a 51 lots went for a towering $601 per pound, environment a new universe record.
A naturally processed Geisha, a 100lb lot came from a Cañas Verdes Farm—part of a famed Hacienda La Esmeralda in Boquete—and scored a whopping 94.115 on a cupping table. The lot was purchased by Jason Kew of Kew Specialty Coffee Co LTD of Korea. The $60,100 sum cost tab is zero brief of impressive, unless we are Daniel Peterson, a owners of Hacienda La Esmeralda, who is quoted in Panama Today as saying, “We were not impressed.”
And yet it was a transparent leader of a day, a Cañas Verdes healthy Geisha was though one of many lots to make waves during a 2017 Best of Panama auction. There were a sum of 4 lots to obscure a $100/lb mark, including a cleared Geisha from Finca Sophia, a plantation owned in partial by Equator Coffee’s co-founders Helen Russell and Brooke McDonnell, that sole for $254.80/lb. This is a same plantation that constructed a coffee used in Talya Strader’s third place finish during a 2017 US Barista Championship. This second-highest labelled lot, along with a third tip from La Mula, was purchased and separate by Japan’s Saza Coffee and Aroma Coffee.
While a infancy of a lots adult for auction will be anticipating their approach to Asia, Specialty Coffee Association of Panama President Wilford Lamastus records in a press recover that a sum of 13 countries from 4 continents were represented on a winners list:
In total, a 5,950 pounds of coffee sole a whopping $368,771, an normal cost of $61.98/lb.
It’s tough not to be tender by these numbers (I’m fighting each titillate to be Debbie Downer and pronounce about how small this affects specialty coffee as a whole or how a coffee prices have stagnated and are artificially low, so greatfully bear with me). This auction represents a really tip-top of a coffee pyramid and uncover a arrange of heights coffee prices can reach. They’re substantially never going to change a minds of the “a crater of coffee shouldn’t cost $3” crowd, though they nonetheless pronounce to a legitimacy of high-end coffee in terms zodiacally understood: dollars.
A full list of auction lots and sale prices can be found here.
Zac Cadwalader is a news editor during Sprudge Media Network.
*top picture around Best of Panama
