The highest-scoring coffee in El Salvador’s 2026 Cup of Excellence is a Honey-processed Bernardina from Finca La Esperanza, which earned 91.95 points ahead of the competition’s July 2 auction. It topped a field of 108 submissions, and it’s the first time Bernardina, a rare variety discovered on a Pacas family farm in 2008, has led the country’s Cup of Excellence lineup after placing third in 2019.
The Coffee
La Esperanza sits in the Apaneca-Ilamatepec mountain range in western El Salvador, the country’s principal coffee-growing region. The farm is run by siblings Alfredo and Maria Pacas through Inversiones Santonano, S.A. De C.V.; the family bought La Esperanza in 2010 and rebuilt it after coffee leaf rust devastated the property.
The winning lot is a Bernardina, a rare variety the Pacas family first noticed on one of their farms in 2008, when a manager named Ruperto Bernardino Merche spotted five unusual, unlabeled trees that turned out to date back to coffee stock brought from Ethiopia’s Agaro region in the 1930s. DNA testing later found the variety shares roughly 70 percent of its genetics with Geisha and 30 percent with Agaro; the family named it after the man who found it. It has also proven more resistant to leaf rust than Bourbon, a trait that has mattered since rust devastated much of El Salvador’s crop starting in 2013. Even now, La Esperanza’s Alfredo Pacas isn’t sure how the variety ended up on his family’s trees. “We don’t exactly know how Bernardina got to our farm,” he said. “It is a mystery we will likely never solve, but we are proud of the results yielded by the trees.”
The lot was processed as honey, meaning the cherries were depulped but some of the fruit’s sugars, the mucilage, were left on the parchment to dry with the bean, splitting the difference between a washed coffee’s clarity and a natural’s fruit-forward sweetness.
Two other lots led their categories. Los Morales, farmed by Henri Milton Morales Umaña, took the top Natural spot with a Geisha at 91.7 points. San Andrés, farmed by Jose Alfredo Recinos Diaz, won the Experimental category with a Geisha processed Natural Anaerobic at 90.55 points.
Where to Buy
The 2026 lot goes to auction on July 2, and buyer information isn’t available until bidding closes. La Esperanza’s coffee has previously been sold by roasters including Proud Mary Coffee and Corvus Coffee, though not this specific lot or vintage. We’ll update this post with a direct purchase link once a roaster confirms it bought the winning lot.
The Win
The Cup of Excellence is the specialty coffee world’s oldest farm-lot competition, run by the non-profit Alliance for Coffee Excellence since 1999. Coffees are entered by producers and blind-cupped twice: first by a national jury, then by an international panel. Only lots scoring 87 points or above earn the designation. El Salvador’s 2026 competition drew 108 submissions, evaluated by 18 judges across four days of cupping, and produced 29 qualifying lots across the Washed & Honey, Natural, and Experimental categories.
Bernardina remains a rarity even within El Salvador: its five original trees were only identified as a distinct variety less than two decades ago, and it’s still largely unknown outside a handful of Salvadoran farms.