A Lesson from Kona

Years ago, when I was running a roastery in Kona, we invited a locally renowned coffee farmer to join us for a cupping. He was highly respected in the Japanese market and sold out his entire production every season to very high-end buyers. His coffee had a reputation for being serious, traditional, and refined—the kind of producer people point to when they talk about “world-class” coffee.

That morning, we were already cupping when he arrived. The table was set with a flight of Ethiopian naturals, and we had just been discussing one coffee in particular. As a group of tasting professionals, we all agreed it was excellent: sweet citrus, jammy berry notes, very prominent florality. Clean, expressive, layered. A coffee that checked all the boxes for what many of us are trained to look for.

When our guest tasted it, he made a sour face immediately.

“This tastes like jam and citrus fruit,” he said. “And it tastes almost floral. This is not good coffee.”

There was no provocation in it just conviction. To him, those flavors were flaws, not virtues. They conflicted with what his customers expected and valued, and he had built an entire business around serving those expectations successfully.

That moment has stayed with me because it illustrates one side of a divide in specialty coffee: experienced professionals whose definition of “good” is shaped by their customers, their markets, and long-term relationships not by competitions or trend cycles.

A Different Perspective

But there’s another side to that divide.

At The Coffee LAB, we regularly host guests who are newer to specialty coffee. Someone might taste an anaerobic natural or a super-extended fermentation coffee for the first time and say, “I don’t think I like this, it tastes sour,” or “This doesn’t taste like coffee.”

Given a little guidance context about acidity level, processing method, or roast style, they often circle back. A second sip lands differently. The coffee opens up. What initially felt confusing becomes interesting, sometimes even exciting.

In these moments, preference isn’t fixed! It’s developing.

This is where things get complicated. Some people know exactly what they want and judge coffee through the lens of their own taste or service to their customers. Others are still learning how to taste and need context before enjoyment clicks. Both are legitimate. Both are real. And both exist far outside the established structure of the high-value coffee market today.

The Role of Competitions

Elite coffee competitions like Cup of Excellence are a perfect illustration of how the high-value coffee segment operates.

Competitions are designed for judges, producers, roasters, and institutions. They operate within tightly controlled sensory frameworks, using calibrated panels and standardized language to compare coffees against one another. Within that system, they work well. They reward execution, consistency, and technical distinction.

Competitions are focused on the creative expression and technical achievement possible in coffee, and are structurally unconcerned with the majority of B2B coffee buyers and less-experienced end-consumers who are still learning how to taste.

This matters because competitions sit upstream of value creation. The industry often assumes that demand flows naturally from success: a coffee wins, attention follows, prices rise, consumers respond.

Winning establishes legitimacy. Scarcity amplifies desire. Marketing fills in the narrative. Coffees become desirable because they are framed as exceptional long before most people ever encounter them. “Best” becomes a claim rather than an experience.

The Consumer Gap

Meanwhile, the things most customers actually respond to consistency, ritual, emotional connection—are rarely what competitions are optimized to measure.

A coffee that dazzles in a single cupping session may not be the one someone wants to drink every morning. A coffee that requires explanation to be appreciated may still be wonderful, but only if someone is there to do the explaining. And—more importantly only if the coffee is available for people to actually drink it.

In theory, competitions are meant to bridge this divide. To act as a translation layer between innovation and experience, highlighting not just what is technically impressive, but how and why it matters to drinkers at different stages of understanding.

Green coffee competitions have undoubtedly inspired producers to push the boundaries of coffee quality. The level of innovation and care going into top lots today may never have been achieved without the enticement of being named as a winner in a Cup of Excellence event, or receiving some other top award.

The Limitation of Competition Lots

The nature of competitions, though, leads to them becoming an entire economy unto themselves. The coffees that win are produced at nano-scale and intended for only one purpose: winning the competition.

If these lots are available for purchase at all, they will be offered only at punishingly high prices in extremely small quantities. This means that there is often no opportunity for the general public to taste these coffees, and therefore no way for the publicity around a competition-winning coffee to lead to genuine consumer education.

Catalyst: Bridging the Gap

This is the gap Catalyst is designed to address.

Rather than treating competition-grade coffees as isolated achievements, Catalyst treats them as research projects, teaching tools, and points of connection with our buying partners and the coffee drinking public.

Catalyst lots are produced at very small scale just like competition lots, but they are developed with the explicit intention of being accessible to actual coffee drinkers who will give feedback and help us drive improvements in our large-scale production. In this way, our nano-lots serve as a catalyst to make our future production lots better and more accessible.

Even though Hala Tree Catalyst lots are offered in exclusive small-batch quantities similar to a competition or auction lot, they are sold first-come, first-served at a set price that is clearly advertised on our website. No bidding, no need for industry-insider connections.

The goal is not to undermine the value of competitions, or the sensory expertise of judges, or to dictate preference. It’s to create a space where innovation serves both the expert who knows exactly what they’re looking for and the individual coffee drinker who may never have the opportunity to taste a competition-winning coffee.