The 2024 COE ranking in Costa Rica, and the introduction of the award-winning variety, San Roque.

COE (Cup of Excellence) is one of the most authoritative fine coffee competitions globally, and also the first internet auction platform for globally award-winning coffee, which was organized and founded by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE) in 1999.

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

Traditional washed processes group

Traditional honey & natural processes group

Experimental processes group

In this COE competition, it can be seen that currently, the majority of the participating varieties are Gesha, but there are also some common coffee varieties such as Typica and Catuai. In addition, there is a relatively new coffee variety, which is San Roque. San Roque is a rare variety that often appears on the COE list in Costa Rica since 2018.

San Roque

According to records, San Roque first appeared on the COE list in 2018 and achieved the 14th place in the 2018 COE, from the Finca Leoncio estate in the Valley Central region.

The owner of the estate, Manuel Antonio Barrantes Zuñiga, said that this was inherited by the owner 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, the Finca Leoncio estate participated in the then COE competition, but at that time, Antonio, the owner of the estate, did not have a clear understanding of what variety was submitted, so the sample was submitted under the name of SL28.

As a result, this variety won the 2015 Costa Rican COE championship with 91.46 points, which attracted much attention. However, they found that this champion bean was not like the traditional SL28, but they could not tell what variety it was.

Until 2018, after genetic testing, it was discovered to be a variant of SL28, named after it was first discovered in the central part of San Roque in Costa Rica. Moreover, because of the award in 2015, the neighbors of Finca Leoncio requested for the bean seedlings, and Finca Leoncio was very generous in distributing them everywhere, so this coffee variety began to be widely planted in the coffee gardens adjacent to the central valley where Finca Leoncio is located. And in the recent COE, the San Roque variety has been seen repeatedly.

And this San Roque is similar in flavor performance to SL28, the difference is that the top young leaves of the San Roque variety are light brown, while the top young leaves of SL28 are green. The reason why the 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 previous COE judges’ reviews, the San Roque coffee has very complex comprehensive fruit flavors whether it is sun-dried, washed, or honey-processed.