Gold Star Coffee Wins Big at The Cup of Excellence

Exclusive Auction Coffee Win: Mexican El Mirador: Honey/Geisha - Cup Of Excellence Winner

This year, Gold Star Coffee entered the Cup of Excellence auction and emerged as the only North American roaster to win a lot! We competed against international buyers from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Our winning bid secured Lot #6: Mexican El Mirador: Honey/Geisha - Cup Of Excellence Winner, an exceptionally rare, high-scoring, honey-processed Geisha coffee from the high-altitude mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Coffee: El Mirador

Producer: Heladio García España

Origin: Santa María Yucuhití, Oaxaca, Mexico

Competition: Cup of Excellence Mexico 2026

Jury score: 88.28

Rank: #6 — Traditional Honey

Process: Honey

Variety: Geisha

Roast: Agtron Score 60 Light (City / City+)

Securing this specific lot is a massive milestone for our team and our customers. In the global coffee market, winning auction lots are almost always bought up by giant overseas companies in markets like Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Western Europe. Keeping this single, top-tier lot here in North America is a huge win for local coffee lovers. Mexican El Mirador: Honey/Geisha - Cup Of Excellence Winner represents the absolute best of small-batch coffee farming. When the online bidding closed, Gold Star Coffee won the exclusive rights to every single pound of this harvest. Now, this award-winning coffee is heading straight to our roastery for you to enjoy.

What Is The Cup of Excellence?

Created in 1999, the Cup of Excellence is a global competition set up to find and reward the world’s best specialty coffees. Coffee farmers in countries like Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico enter their absolute best harvests into the contest. The program pushes farmers to focus on quality, encouraging better farming practices, careful hand-picking, and precise processing.

Before the Cup of Excellence was created, talented coffee farmers had no good way to show off their hard work. For decades, small farmers who spent extra time picking only ripe coffee cherries were forced to mix their amazing crops into huge commercial batches. They were paid the exact same low rates as farms producing low-quality beans. The Cup of Excellence changed the coffee world by creating full transparency. It built a fair stage where farm size and commercial budget do not matter at all. The only thing that matters is how good the coffee tastes in a blind test. Today, it is known as the highest honour in coffee farming, helping small rural farmers get noticed on a global stage.

Understanding the Coffee: Honey-Processed Geisha

In specialty coffee farming, the honey-process is a delicate drying method. Instead of washing the coffee bean completely clean right after picking, farmers leave a layer of the natural coffee fruit sticky and intact while the beans dry in the sun. This natural fruit layer soaks into the bean, giving the final cup a noticeable sweetness, a smooth body, and complex fruit and floral flavours. Combined with the natural traits of the famous Geisha coffee plant—known around the world as the absolute crown jewel of coffee varieties due to its floral aroma, light tea-like body, and rare flavour—this processing style creates an incredible taste experience. By passing multiple rounds of blind taste tests by international judges, Lot #6 Mexican El Mirador: Honey/Geisha - Cup Of Excellence Winner proved itself as one of the very best coffee harvests in Mexico. Winning this lot gives our customers exclusive access to a rare, traceable coffee that you cannot buy from any other roaster in North America.

To understand why Geisha coffee is so famous, you have to look at how hard it is to grow. The Geisha plant originally came from the high forests of Ethiopia before moving to central and South America. Geisha trees are delicate. They need very high altitudes, healthy volcanic soil, good shade, and perfect weather to grow. Unlike common coffee trees that produce heavy amounts of beans, Geisha trees produce very little. But what they do produce is unmatched in quality. Instead of tasting heavy or bitter like low-grade coffee, Geisha tastes clean, light, and sweet. It brings out natural scents of jasmine flowers along with clear flavour notes of peach, sweet citrus, and floral tea.

When you take this legendary plant variety and use the honey-process at the El Mirador farm in Oaxaca, the result is clear. By letting the natural fruit sugars dry directly on the bean, the farmer balances the light, floral taste of the Geisha bean with a smooth, honey-like texture. Every sip delivers a balanced mix of sweet fruit, floral aromas, and a clean finish.

How Beans Earn the Title: Blind Evaluation & Scoring

To earn the Cup of Excellence title, coffee samples must go through many strict rounds of blind taste tests by local and international experts. The judges evaluate each coffee without knowing who grew it or what farm it came from. They score the coffee purely on flavour, sweetness, acidity, clarity, and overall balance. Only coffees that achieve a top score of 87 points or higher on a strict 100-point scale win the official Cup of Excellence title.

Winning this contest is a long, tough process designed to filter out any sub-par beans. First, hundreds of submitted samples are tested at the national level. Independent auditors hide the farm names and give every coffee a random tracking number so the tasting panel remains completely unbiased. A national team of trained tasters samples every batch, picking only the best ones to move forward.

Next, those top samples are sent to an International Jury made up of leading coffee experts from around the world. These judges score the coffee across several days of testing. They check every single detail—from how the dry grounds smell to how the liquid tastes as it cools down. They look for clean flavours, natural sweetness, pleasant acidity, smooth body, and a clean aftertaste. If a coffee has even one small defect, it is sent home. To score an 88.28 like Mexican El Mirador: Honey/Geisha - Cup Of Excellence Winner did, a coffee must taste practically flawless across every single testing round.

Empowering Coffee Producers

Only top-scoring coffees win the Cup of Excellence label. Winning helps small farmers gain global fame and earn much higher prices for their crops. This sets up a fair, long-term reward system for small-scale growers. The online auction system connects honest roasters directly with passionate farmers, making sure the money goes straight back to the farm communities that did the hard work.

Regular commercial coffee is usually bought and sold on global commodity markets where prices swing wildly. These prices are often set by traders rather than the real quality of the product. This leaves small farmers struggling, often earning less than what it costs to grow the crop. The Cup of Excellence replaces that system with a direct auction. It allows quality-focused buyers to pay five, ten, or even twenty times the standard market price for winning lots. That money goes directly back to the winning farmers like Heladio Garcia España at El Mirador. It gives them the funds to improve their farms, pay pickers fair wages, protect their local water supplies, and keep growing world-class coffee. Buying an auction lot is a direct way to support the hard-working people behind the crop.

Gold Star Coffee’s ACE Membership

Through our membership with the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE), Gold Star Coffee supports a global movement that honours great coffee farming and makes sure growers get fair pay.

This membership gives Gold Star Coffee direct access to private Cup of Excellence online auctions. By buying directly through these auctions, we can buy rare, award-winning coffee lots straight from individual farms. These fully traceable coffees upgrade our main menu, giving our customers access to some of the absolute best coffee harvests on the planet while skipping middleman supply chains.

Being an active ACE member is a core part of how we run our business. We believe in getting coffee lovers the best products possible without taking shortcuts. Our membership keeps us connected with global leaders in coffee quality and fair trade practices. It opens up doors to private auctions that average commercial coffee companies cannot enter. This allows us to build a direct bridge from the mountains of Oaxaca straight to our roastery, cutting out middleman markups and guaranteeing that you get 100% real competition-grade coffee.

Small-Batch Roasting Standards

To honour the quality of Mexican El Mirador: Honey/Geisha - Cup Of Excellence Winner, Gold Star Coffee roasts these rare coffees strictly in small batches. Roasting in small micro-batches lets us control the heat with high precision, protecting the delicate fruit and floral flavours of the Geisha bean.

When you are dealing with coffee beans this rare and expensive, standard commercial roasting methods will ruin them. High heat and dark roasting burn away the natural floral aromas and delicate stone fruit flavours that took a full year to grow. To prevent that, our roasting process uses careful temperature adjustments and close monitoring throughout the entire roast. By roasting this small harvest in tiny batches, we apply a custom heat profile that gently brings out the natural sugars inside the bean. This small-batch approach locks in the natural purity of the bean, making sure every bag we send out tastes exactly as the farmer intended.

Upcoming 

This exclusive harvest will be available to our customers in just a few weeks at a remarkably reasonable price. Gold Star Coffee remains dedicated to bringing world-class award winning specialty coffee to everyday coffee drinkers. We make sure that even the rarest competition-grade lots stay affordable without crazy price tags. By offering this tiny batch directly to you, we carry out our mission to make super-premium coffee accessible to everyone. Securing Lot #6: Mexican El Mirador: Honey/Geisha - Cup Of Excellence Winner directly from Oaxaca gives you a unique chance to try one of the highest-scoring coffee harvests in the world today.

Keep an eye on our site over the coming weeks so you don't miss out on tasting the only North American winning lot from this year's Mexico Cup of Excellence competition!