LAMILL Showcases Cup of Excellence Winners

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Coffee Los Angeles

LAMILL customers never know what might fill their mugs. Possibly Cup of Excellence coffees.

September 19, LAMILL Coffee CEO Craig Min sat down at his coffee bar to discuss their current initiative: showcasing Cup of Excellence coffees. Over the past two weeks, LAMILL has released three Cup of Excellence winners. By October, they’ll offer all eight of their purchases.

Cup of Excellence is an organization that determines top coffees from nine leading coffee producing nations, every year. The nations are Rwanda, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. An international contingent of coffee cuppers determines the winners, and the winning beans are then sold through a blind internet auction.

Min thinks it’s important to put the coffee farmer front-and-center, and LAMILL’s special Cup of Excellence menu is one way to do that. “It just kind of represents some hard work and craft from people that love what they do,” says Min. “The auction really highlights and rewards the hard work. They’re very small families. They’re very small farmers. They really strive to make a better product as well as to better the business as well. We kind of bring that out to show who’s making the coffee.”

The Cup of Excellence program also allows international coffee buyers to forge lasting relationships with previously unknown coffee farmers. In 2006, LAMILL won a lot of Brazilian Serra de Bone coffee at auction. John Gozbekian, LAMILL’s Director of Coffee, was recently down in Brazil meeting with the farmer to secure beans for next year. “John said the owner of the farm was surprised that we were even using their name,” says Min. “The farm name is in our store on all the packaging. That’s what we do when we find something that we like.”

In order to find eight coffees they liked enough to purchase at Cup of Excellence auctions, Min and Gozbekian roasted over 100 samples.

Here’s how a Cup of Excellence auction works, according to Min: “Green samples will go out to all the people who have the right to participate in the auction. There’s a certain amount of paperwork and licensing fees and things of that sort to get into Cup of Excellence. Once you’re in, they send you samples, you roast it. You have to call your broker and give them the highest price you’re willing to pay at auction.” It’s a blind auction.

Coffee roasters like LAMILL benefit from Cup of Excellence via better coffee, and the farmers benefit financially. Min points to the family that he purchased Bolivian coffee from at auction, saying, “Now that they’ve won Cup of Excellence, they’ll be able to increase their production five acres…It’s pretty phenomenal how much money is paid at auction. As a roaster, you see two palette loads moving, for #1 coffees, moving close to a quarter-million dollars. That’s making a difference in somebody’s life.”

All of LAMILL’s Cup of Excellence selections are brewable using five different extraction methods: Clover ($3.50), Chemex ($12), Eva Solo ($8), French Press ($6) and Siphon ($15).

Guatemala Ocaña [Oh-SAHN-Yah] beans are available for $29 per pound. According to LAMILL’s tasting notes, “San José Ocaña farm was founded in 1623. Cornelio Lazo Arreaga bought the farm and over 5 genertions have produced coffee. Now the sons of Roberto Sánchez Lazo are working on it.”

When tasting the Ocaña, Min said, “It’s very balanced. It’s crisp. It’s sweet. It really just has a nice touch of brightness.”

Bolivia Mara ($19 per pound) dates to 1993, when “Inocencio Mamani Cori began growing coffee in order to provide for his seven children and three grand-children.”

Min tasted the Mara and said, “It’s extremely rich. It’s kind of medium to full bodied. It’s very low acidity. Bolivia’s actually the newest coffee producing country. They haven’t been around very long. Cup of Excellence went over there in the last year or two. It’s great because the Cup is still identifying people who are doing great things in coffee.”

El Salvador Suiza is available for $29 per pound, courtesy of farmers Carlos Menéndez, wife Julia Margarita Molina Martínez and son Juan Francisco. Min says of the Suiza: “This one’s a very complex coffee. In our tasting notes on it, I remember a lot of apple, a lot of caramel, kind of going deeper, there was butter cream and pecan, but it’s a medium bodied coffee. It’s a Bourbon.”

Although Hacienda La Esmeralda has never been sold via Cup of Excellence, the Panamanian Geisha beans have earned a reputation for being the most expensive (and one of the best) coffees in the world. This year, LAMILL is preparing Esmeralda using five different extraction methods: Clover ($6), Chemex ($20), Eva Solo ($10), French Press ($10) and Siphon ($20). For home use, the beans are available for $25 per half-pound and $45 per pound.

“With the Esmeralda, that price is like a break even cost,” says Min. “A lot of it is to continue to offer things that people can open their minds to. We want to make it accessible.”

The Peterson family, who owns Hacienda La Esmeralda, sold their beans via the record-setting “Best of Panama” auction last year, but ran their own auction this year. “They’re very small lots,” says Min. “They chopped up their lots so a lot of people could get involved in buying some of their coffee.” LAMILL purchased Lot #6, containing 300 pounds.

When sipping the Esmeralda, Min said, “You can taste the complexity. It’s extremely elegant. It’s a classic body. It’s a little sweet, has almost a heavy, lush wood. The acidity, it’s sparkly, just kind of tingles. A lot of coffees tend to dominate the palate, but this has a sparkliness that’s kind of nice.”

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Joshua Lurie

Joshua Lurie founded FoodGPS in 2005. Read about him here.

Blog Comments

Just a minor, but to us, important correction. Esmeralda Special has always been sold in the ‘Best of Panama’ annual auction. Neither Hacienda La Esmeralda nor Panama have ever been involved with that admirable organization,Cup of Excellence. I thank you very much Min, for your kind words about our coffee.

I had the Hacienda La Esmeralda at Intelligentsia last weekend and it was really good. It’s definitely worth the money and it’s a dollar cheaper at La Mill. I really like the Cup of Excellence, as it begins to equate coffee like Bordeaux vintages, with the consumer able to differentiate terroir from year to year. The auction system also accentuates the need for discerning tasters (hence the Q grading system)

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