Two years ago, Passenger’s green-buying team had the privilege of joining the inaugural ‘Copa de Oro’ regional cupping event in Huila, Colombia, put on by our import partners at Osito Coffee. For a number of years prior, Passenger had participated in a similar cupping competition from this region in Colombia known as the ‘Copa Suaceña’. Each annual edition of the "Suaza Cup" pursued the goal of identifying and recognizing the highest quality coffees produced by the Divino Niño producer group: a community of farmers that has been one of Passenger's Foundational Partners since 2018. It was with the first Copa de Oro event that the Suaza Cup grew into a broader and more ambitious regional cupping event, and we were delighted to once again participate as cupping judges during this most recent harvest year.

In addition to remaining open to submissions from all the familiar names we've come to know and love in Divino Niño, the larger Copa de Oro competition features an expanded regional scope in order to welcome entrants from other sub-regions of western, southern, and central Huila that are areas of particular focus for our partners at Osito. Twenty lots from each of these broad geographical regions were screened and pre-selected by Osito's Colombia-based cupping team. The 60 lots that were entered into the competition were rigorously evaluated by an international team of judges (from Colombia, Japan, Canada, Ireland, and the U.S.) across three days of blind cupping. At the end of competition week, the top 20 lots were cupped one final time to determine the ranking for the top 5 coffees from each of the three regions. And when all was said and done, the highest-scoring coffee among these regional champions was ultimately recognized as the overall winner of the inaugural Copa de Oro.

This coffee, from producer Gildardo Lopez, took second place in the ‘Western’ region of the Copa de Oro, and second only to his son Ivan, in the overall rankings. His farm, El Calamar, is located at around 2,000 masl in the municipality of Paicol, which is in the extreme west of Huila, in close proximity to the nearby department of Cauca. Gildardo was one of the first producers that our export partners at Osito worked with from the region of Paicol. Since then, Gildardo and his wife Yolanda have continued to produce top-quality coffee of their own while also paving the way for their children, who themselves have risen in the ranks of regional cupping competitions. Gildardo’s son, Ivan, won the overall prize at Copa de Oro, making for a special moment when both of them took center stage at the award ceremony on the final day. Like nearly all of the competition entries in this year’s Copa de Oro competition, this extremely small volume lot is made up entirely of washed pink bourbon variety. The coffee goes through a meticulous processing approach where whole ripe cherries are first fermented for 30 hours before going to the pulper. The pulped coffee is then dry fermented for an additional 48 hours before being washed and finally dried on raised beds.