What Are Coffee Auction Beans? What's the Difference Between Auction and Non-Auction Coffee Beans?

Understanding Competition Coffee Beans

The competition beans most of us encounter are, in essence, the finest coffees a country produced that year, sold through online auctions that let buyers worldwide bid in an open, transparent process. These coffees are defined as competition lots and stored in a unified warehouse. The format also spreads the reputation of award-winning farms far and fast — and lets competition lots command correspondingly higher prices.

Every award-winning coffee must have something singular about it, and it has certainly survived rigorous scrutiny: it was judged the best among many farms. Competition lots contain few defective or insect-damaged beans, show high consistency in size and color, and even expand and develop color uniformly after roasting. Their flavor reflects the growing environment, soil, variety, and the green-bean processing method, creating a taste all their own. While a farm's ordinary output may not differ dramatically lot to lot, competition beans are unquestionably the best the farm had to offer that year.

Note an important distinction: "competition beans" means coffee from that specific competition lot — not, broadly, any coffee produced by an estate that once won. Award-winning estates also sell non-competition coffee. Panama's Hacienda La Esmeralda, for example, has its champion Geisha lot ES-09, other Geisha lots priced at $15 per pound, and even non-Geisha Esmeralda coffees. In quality, these naturally fall short of the competition lots.

Because competitions evaluate coffees from different estates within a single country, coffees from different countries cannot be compared: a bean that scores highly in Country A is not necessarily better than one from Country B.

Coffee is an agricultural product, and weather shifts from year to year, changing both quality and yield. So an estate's past glory should not be carried into the current season — the current harvest is the only fair standard. An estate that won awards in 2011, if it produces no competition lots since, will not match the quality or price of its award-winning batches.

When buying competition lots, don't forget to ask the shop for the C.O.E. approved stickers.

Some small farmers produce only tiny volumes, but precisely because of that, they can cultivate and care for their trees more attentively — and quality rises. The smaller the competition lot, the better it tends to be.

Judges change every year and in every country, and each has personal preferences, so scoring standards are never identical. Still, a certain quality floor is guaranteed — and choosing competition lots also protects you from unscrupulous producers mixing other varieties into their bags to confuse consumers. That, too, is an advantage of buying competition coffee.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If auction-lot coffee is on your wishlist, FrontStreet Coffee's Esmeralda Red Label Geisha is the closest thing to a champion cup you can brew at home. The "Esmeralda Special" lots grow at 1,600-1,800 meters, must score above 90 points on the cupping table, each carries its own independent lot number, and every lot comes entirely from a single small plot — so you can choose the exact micro-lot whose flavor nuances suit you, much like bidding on a competition batch.

For an alternative taste of the Gesha legend, FrontStreet Coffee also offers Geisha Village Gold Label from Ethiopia — the Gesha 1931 variety representing 10% of the estate's output and its top coffee outside auction, refined-natural processed with complex, layered flavors — and the Geisha Village Red Label (Gori Gesha, 15% of production, 88+ points on the SCA 100-point scale), whose Growers Reserve lots carry full traceability from farm block name to variety to processing date.