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COE Competition and Coffee Cup Test and scoring Standard

Published: 2026-01-14 Author:

Last Updated: 2026/01/14, Last month, Qianjie shared with you the scoring system of the cup test, in which we briefly mentioned COE. In daily life, the word COE often appears on the label of some beans. This arouses everyone's curiosity: what is COE? COE "COE", full name is "C"

Last month, Qianjie shared with you the scoring system of the cup test, in which we briefly mentioned COE. In daily life, the word COE often appears on the label of some beans. This arouses everyone's curiosity: what is COE?

COE "COE", whose full name is "Cup of Excellence", translates to mean "excellent Cup". It was first held in Brazil in 1999 by the non-profit organization Coffee Excellence (ACE). It can be said that it is the most famous and authoritative high-quality coffee raw bean competition in the world!

Every country can bid for the COE competition, and the "contestants" of the COE competition are beans from the host country! And the beans that win in the competition will win enough fame and considerable auction revenue for the manor in the auction after the competition. The huge revenue from the auction makes farmers full of motivation to cultivate high-quality coffee, and we can also enjoy more high-quality coffee. It can be said that COE perfectly explains to the farmers that "if you work hard, you will be rewarded".

COE's scoring system, let's go back to COE's scoring system! The cup test score of COE is a little different from that of SCA, which is derived from the scoring system of SCA! We can go to the article "SCA scoring Project" to learn more about the scoring system of SCA! The cup test of COE is four cups for each sample, and the scoring table is as follows:

The two are roughly the same, the main difference lies in the difference in individual details! In the COE scoring items, dry / wet incense is no longer included in the total score, and the cleanliness score will be more stringent! Alcohol thickness is directly changed to taste (Mouth feel), the taste is not only to evaluate the alcohol thickness, but also whether it is smooth, whether there is astringency, etc., in order to be able to score from the perspective of more yuan! The evaluation of flavor refers to the new version of the flavor wheel, and the judges can make a more accurate and concrete evaluation (finally, there is a blank column to describe)! Then COE abandoned the project of consistency!

COE match system each country's COE match system is somewhat different, let's take Ethiopia's COE in 2020 as an example! The whole Ethiopian COE tournament consists of three parts: the primary stage (Pre-selection), the domestic campaign stage (National jury) and the international campaign phase (International jury). The judges in the pre-selection stage are all professional judges from the host country, and the general number of judges will be about 1218. They will conduct a rigorous review of the sample beans, from the degree of baking to the cup test process and so on. Only beans with a cup test score of more than 85 points in the pre-selection stage are eligible to advance to the next stage of the competition.

Domestic election stage also uses the host country's domestic professional judges, this stage will be promoted from the primary stage of beans, re-screening! The beans who win this round will enter the final stage of the international campaign! The jury at this stage of the international campaign is made up of testers of the International Cup, and all participating sample beans will be affixed with a random number, corresponding to which only the auditor will know. After getting the number, the beans will be blindly tested by the jury! In the end, the score of more than 87 points will be rated as the COE bidding batch, while the remaining beans will be less than the bidding batch, but the score will generally be more than 85 points, these beans belong to the national winning batch (National winners)!

But whether it is the COE bidding batch, or the national winning batch, it needs to be obtained through bidding, which is also a link that farmers pay most attention to! Therefore, when we buy beans, the COE that we can see on the label from time to time may be the "contestants" who win in the competition. As for why it is possible, it is because some of them are COE "same batch" rather than COE bidding batch.

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