Hallelujah for the Panamanian coffee bush - The Best of Panama Auction

Grateful and proud I am. That with the Boats we provide so much delicious coffee, also together with the great coffee farmers of Panama.

The sound of the coffee berry
Yesterday in the webinar on Best of Panama coffee, I saw again some of Panama's most famous coffee farmers. It felt a bit like "coming home" to me: coffee mother Maria Ruiz, looking so beautiful and talking about the sound of the coffee berry that the picking experts of the Ngobe Bugle Indians can hear. Price Peterson, the grandfather of Panamanian Geisha coffee, from the Hacienda la Esmeralda. Q grader and coffee expert Tessie Hartmann, producer of our Panama Mi Finquita and Panama Geisha Ultra, who produced the second best coffee this year with Finca Hartmann (Geisha Jaguar Natural). And then very relaxed, my brother Willem Boot, who won the top prize this year with the best coffee in Panama, from his Finca Geisha Sophia.

I remember again how my father Jacob and mother Marianne first tasted coffee in Panama with the Ruiz family almost thirty years ago. And how we engaged in coffee knowledge exchange. And how Willem and I imported our first lot of Panamaria coffee from Panama via direct trade. That Panamaria coffee, which was so fantastic even then ...

World record
I am proud because last night the world record price per kg at all coffee auctions in the world was broken by coffee farmer Willem Boot and coffee farmer Tessie Hartmann!

For Willem's green coffee, the winning bid was 2,867 USD per kilo and for the Hartmann Geisha Jaguar coffee 'only' slightly lower : 2,205 USD. This is, of course, an exceptional amount. But do you know that with this amount you can make up to a hundred cups of coffee? You could drink the most expensive coffee in the world for almost Euro 28 per cup!

Too cheap
Apart from this Panamanian world record, almost all coffee is actually still extremely cheap! A good specialty 84+ coffee is one that experts give at least an eight-and-a-half as a rating. You can make such coffees at home from as little as 25 cents a cup. Unfortunately, many people do not realize that the difference between a good cup of coffee and an average cup of coffee is huge. And they continue to buy bad, cheap supermarket coffee that is actually not drinkable, also because the farmer can never pay enough attention to his product at these extremely low purchase prices.

How wonderful for everyone in the coffee world of Panama and the coffee farmers worldwide (and so also for coffee drinkers) that these records have now been broken. In 2000 the coffee farmers were still getting about 1 USD for their straightforward coffee and at most 4 to 5 USD for very good quality. The records that Geisha coffees have achieved in recent years have broken the glass ceiling: for really high quality, really high prices can (no: should! I think) be paid.

The Geisha records have had a direct impact on all global coffee auctions in the past few years: they have caused (slowly) rising prices of all specialty coffee 84+. That seems nice, but is a (still) small step because only about 7 percent of the coffee produced in the world is specialty coffee so for a huge mountain of coffee is still underpaid! Every cloud has a silver lining, our wish for coffee farmers to receive a decent price for their products has come one small step closer.

Happiness through Taste

View the range of Panamanian coffees

Tags:
panama, auction, coffee, boot, willem, hartmann, geisha, ruiz, finquita, panamaria, happinessdoor taste, taste, record, Tessie Palacios Hartmann, Plinio Ruiz, Maria Ruiz, Rachel Peterson, Wilford Lamastus Jr., Wilford Lamastus Sr., Willem Boot, Price Peterson, Ricardo Koyner, Jackie Mercer, Janson estate, Don Pépé estate, Graciano Cruz.