The Cup of Excellence (COE) is one of the world's most renowned and authoritative specialty coffee competitions, founded in 1999 by the non-profit organization Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE). It holds coffee competitions and auctions in multiple coffee-producing countries around the world, aiming to help local coffee farmers gain recognition and more income for the high-quality coffee they produce.

The competition was first held in Brazil, and this year's Cup of Excellence competition in Brazil, the 2024 edition, marks COE's 25th anniversary in Brazil. Recently, the results of the competition have been announced. This year, it is again divided into three categories: the Natural category, the Washed + Honey category, and the Experimental category.

Natural category

Washed + Honey

Experimental

At this year's Cup of Excellence competition in Brazil, the winning varieties differed from those of other coffee-producing countries, with some relatively rare coffee varieties appearing, such as Arara and Topazio, among others. Today we will get to know what these varieties are.

Arara

The Arara variety has a relatively complex lineage, being a cross between the Yellow Catuai and Obata varieties. According to records, it was first discovered in 1988 by a researcher at the Instituto Agronomico de Campinas (IAC) in Brazil, when a rather compact coffee tree was found on a farm, bearing yellow fruit; compared with the red-fruited trees next to it, it had resistance to pests and leaf rust, and was also very high-yielding.

So this batch of seeds was sent to the Brazilian coffee technical support foundation (Fundacao Procafe), to a variety selection project farm in Varginha, Minas, followed by 15 years of breeding and planting research, and was officially released to farmers in 2012.

At present, because Arara has Catuai and Obata ancestry, the Arara fruit is yellow, and it has characteristics such as drought tolerance, leaf rust resistance, a compact tree shape, dense fruiting, high yield and high quality, and it adapts easily to different growing environments, so it is favored by farmers. In recent years it has gradually made a name for itself in some international coffee competitions. This variety appeared at the Brazil COE in 2018, though its ranking was relatively low, until this year's COE, when Arara won first place in the experimental processing group, and it also achieved impressive results in the other processing groups.

Topázio

Topázio is a variety developed by the Agronomic Institute of Campinas (IAC) in Brazil between the 1960s and 1970s. It is an artificially selected variety created by crossing the Mundo Novo variety with Catuai, and then backcrossing the hybrid progeny with Catuai.

The purpose of backcrossing is to take advantage of the superior traits of the hybrid, and through backcrossing the hybrid with one of its parents, to allow the parent's traits to be inherited more stably by the progeny. The Topázio variety was crossed with Catuai twice during the hybridization process, so Topázio resembles Catuai in the shape of the coffee tree and in coffee quality, with a small plant and high yield. In addition, Topázio has a longer life cycle, and its fruit is yellow.

This variety appeared on Brazil's 2018 COE list, where it only placed 13th, and by 2024 at COE it won the natural + honey group championship with a score of 91.93.

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