The Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Festival

The Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Festival is an annual event celebrating the island's best-known export, most recently held at Hope Gardens in Kingston. It began in 2018 at Newcastle in St Andrew, moved venues in 2025, and partnered with a second Jamaican festival for the first time in 2026.

How the festival began

According to Wikipedia, the inaugural Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee Festival ran over three days, March 23 to 25, 2018, at Newcastle in St Andrew, a hill town already associated with coffee country and with the nearby Holywell and Hardwar Gap recreation area. Newcastle remained the festival's home for several years afterward.

The pandemic years

Wikipedia's account describes the festival continuing in 2019, then being canceled in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, moving online in 2021, and expanding again in 2022. This guide found no independent Jamaican government or news report confirming the exact scale of each of those individual years, so readers should treat the pandemic-era detail as Wikipedia's account rather than as independently verified here. What is well documented, from Jamaica's Information Service (JIS), is that the festival was still being staged, in person, at Newcastle by 2023 and 2024.

Recent stagings

JIS reported that the eighth staging, on March 1, 2025, moved from the festival's longtime Newcastle grounds to Hope Gardens for expanded capacity. The Tourism Enhancement Fund, working through its Tourism Linkages Network, hosted that staging alongside Jamaica's tourism, industry and agriculture ministries, per JIS. The following year, JIS reported that the Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Festival partnered for the first time with the Jamaica Food and Drink Festival, holding a combined event at Hope Gardens on March 7, 2026, from noon to 10pm. In its March 3, 2026 report on that staging, JIS gave a ticket price of $1,500, available through Touchstonelink.com, the Jamaica Food and Drink Festival's Instagram page, or at the gate, with parking at Hope Gardens, King's House and the University of Technology, Jamaica, and a shuttle service. Figures and arrangements like these belong to that specific staging and should not be assumed to carry over to a later year.

What the festival typically includes

JIS's account of the 2025 staging describes more than 60 vendors, a barista competition won that year by defending champion Rommell Bailey of Café Blue, and cultural performances by the Charles Town Maroons and the Silver Birds Steel Orchestra. For the combined 2026 event, JIS reported more than 70 booths, a Kiddies Village, a farmer's market, a mixology competition alongside the barista competition, and live entertainment. Across the years JIS has covered, the format has consistently paired coffee tastings and a barista competition with wider food, craft and cultural programming rather than being a narrow trade event.

Should you plan a trip around the festival?

The festival's venue and format have both changed more than once in recent years, and its 2026 staging paired it with an entirely separate event for the first time. Because of that, specific dates, tickets and venues for any future staging are best confirmed close to the time, through JIS or the Tourism Enhancement Fund's current announcements, rather than assumed from a past year's details. For coffee visits outside festival season, see Blue Mountain coffee tours, and for how the festival's usual early-March timing sits against the wider calendar, see best time to visit the Blue Mountains.