CoE (Cup of Excellence) is one of the most authoritative specialty coffee competitions in the world, and also the first internet auction platform for globally awarded coffee, founded in 1999 by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE).

Recently, Costa Rica held the 2024 Cup of Excellence competition, and the results have now been announced. In this COE competition, the entries were likewise divided into three groups according to different processing methods.

Traditional Washed Processes

Traditional Honey & Natural Processes

Experimental group

In this COE competition, it can be seen that most of the participants are currently Gesha varieties, but among them there are also some common coffee varieties such as Typica and Catuai, and in addition there is a relatively new coffee variety, San Roque; San Roque has been a rare variety frequently appearing on the Costa Rica COE list since 2018.

San Roque

According to records, San Roque first appeared on the COE list in 2018, when it took 14th place in the 2018 COE, from Finca Leoncio in the Central Valley region (Valley Central).

The estate owner, Manuel Antonio Barrantes Zuñiga, says the estate was inherited from his grandfather Leoncio, and the estate was named after Leoncio; at that time the estate mainly grew Villa Sarchi and SL28 varieties.

In 2015, Finca Leoncio took part in the COE competition of that time, but the estate owner Antonio did not clearly know what variety had been submitted, so it was entered under the name SL28.

As a result, this variety won the 2015 Costa Rica COE championship with a score of 91.46, attracting attention from many parties, but they found that this champion bean was not like the traditional SL28, and they could not tell what variety it was either.

It was not until 2018 that genetic testing revealed it to be a variant of SL28, and because the earliest appearance was in San Roque in central Costa Rica, it was given that name. Moreover, because of the 2015 award, all the neighbors of Finca Leoncio came to ask for seedlings, Finca Leonciowas very generous and distributed them everywhere, so this coffee variety began to be planted throughout Finca Leonciothe neighboring coffee farms in the central valley where it is located, and in the COE of recent years, the San Roque variety has been seen repeatedly.

And this San Roque is similar to SL28 in flavor performance, with the difference being that the tender leaves at the top of the San Roque variety are light brown, while the tender leaves at the top of SL28 are green.The reason the San Roque San Roque variety is popular is related to its ability to adapt to high-altitude plantations and its excellent cup flavor quality.From the flavor notes of past COE judges, San Roque coffee, whether natural, washed, or honey processed, has a very complex composite fruit flavor.