Brazil, with the company São Mateus Agropecuaria, is the winner of the Best of the Best award awarded to Josè Eduardo Dominicale at the conclusion of the 8th edition of the Ernesto Illy International Coffee Award. The award, named after the visionary leader of illycaffè and son of the company founder, celebrates the daily work that illycaffè has been doing for over 30 years alongside producers to offer the best sustainable coffee. 

The award, presented by president Andrea Illy during the gala dinner held at the New York Public Library, was awarded by an international jury of 9 experts who examined the best batches of production 2022-2023. They did this through a blind tasting of the 9 coffees from the 9 countries representing the Illy blend: Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Nicaragua and Rwanda. Before arriving at the jury, each batch of coffee was analysed by the quality laboratories of illycaffè and then judged on the richness and aromatic complexity, the elegance and balance of flavors and the intensity of the aroma.

"The coffee is characterized by its roundness, healthy and full-bodied with rich and balanced aromas of chocolate, caramel, brown sugar and toasted almonds with a delicately sweet and harmonious finish. It represents the most authentic and refined characteristics of this origin" is the motivation with which the jurors indicated the winner.

The Finca Danilandia of Luis Arimany Mondonico of Guatemala has been awarded the Coffee Lovers' Choice award, awarded by a jury of consumers who in the weeks preceding the event have tasted blindly the same samples in illy coffee in Trieste, Milan, Paris, London, São Paulo and New York, expressing their preference. 

The international jury that declared the winner of the Best of the Best was composed of the professional Guatemalan taster Silvia Escobar; the president of the Federação dos Cafeicultores do Cerrado, the Brazilian Glaucio De Castro; CoffeeLab quality laboratory director, Indian Sunalini Narayan Menon; starred chef Ricard Camarena of the Ricard Camarena Restaurant in Valencia; American chefs Carrie and Rupert Blease who run the Lord Stanley restaurant in San Francisco, awarded a Michelin star; by Andrea Aprea, chef just earned the second Michelin star in the restaurant that bears his name in Milan; by the French writer and journalist Adelaide de Clermont-Tonnere, editor of the magazine Point de vue; by Inga Griese, founder and editor-in-chief of Icon, the style supplement of the German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag; by Angelina Villa Clarke, a journalist who writes for the most important English newspapers, including Forbes.

The Ernesto Illy International Coffee Award is also an important meeting point for representatives of the entire coffee supply chain, from producers to exporters, from traders to institutions. All, they met at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York to participate in the round table "How to protect the future of coffee", which took part, together with president Andrea Illy, Vanusia Nogueira (executive director of the International coffee organization); Jeffrey Sachs (economist and co-chair of the Regenerative Society Foundation); Oscar Schaps (president for Latin America of Trading Stone X Financial) and Glaucio de Castro (president of the Federação dos Cafeicultores do Cerrado Mineiro).

"It fills me with joy the absolute victory of a Brazilian coffee of regenerative agriculture chosen blindly by a jury of independent experts among the nine best coffees in the world emphasizes Andrea Illy-. The history of the Ernesto Illy Award began, in fact, in Brazil in 1991, and this confirms that the awards received by illycaffè, for having transformed Brazil from a quantity leader to a quality leader are deserved". 

"After more than twenty-five years of incessant work by our agronomist team and the University of Coffee -adds Illy-, the leap was made thanks to regenerative agriculture, which we decided to develop in 2018 for its benefits to the environment and health".