Nordic Roaster
Nordic Roaster is an annual roasting competition for coffee roasteries in the Nordic countries. Ten of them roast the same green coffee, the coffees are tasted blind, and the title goes to whoever the room scores highest.1
The name is also used loosely for the event it sits inside — the Nordic Roaster Forum, a conference held in Oslo and Copenhagen and run by the same people behind the Nordic Barista Cup.123 This note covers the competition; where a fact belongs to the event rather than the contest, it says so.
What makes it worth a note is the judging. Almost every other title in this wiki is awarded by a small panel of certified judges — see World Coffee Championships and, for the roasting equivalent, World Coffee Roasting Championship. Nordic Roaster hands the score sheets to the audience.
How it works
The published rules for the 2019 edition set it out plainly.1
Who can enter. “Any roaster that is registered as a business and who is selling roasted coffee roasted by themselves, and is located within the Nordic countries, can apply” — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Åland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland.1 Only ten roasters get in, first come first served, and the entry fee is €780, which includes one ticket to the forum.1
What they roast. Two categories in 2019:1
| Category | What the roaster is given | What they submit |
|---|---|---|
| Provided coffee | 30 kg of one identical green coffee, the same for everybody | 10 kg roasted, in 100 g bags |
| Leaf-rust-resistant hybrid cultivars | Nothing — the roaster buys their own | 10 kg of a roasted single origin from an approved hybrid variety, in 100 g bags |
The first category is the interesting one, because it removes green buying from the equation entirely. Everyone starts with the same beans, so the only variable left is the roast. The second category does the opposite: it forces roasters onto varieties bred to survive leaf rust — the Catimor / Sarchimor / F1 hybrid family — which are widely grown and widely assumed to taste worse than the old cultivars. Making a competition category out of them is an argument about that assumption.
How it is scored. “The coffees will be evaluated by the cup-tasting method and will be tasted blind,” using forms based on the SCA 0–100 scale.1 Every attendee at the forum scores; the individual scores are added up and averaged, and the averages from the rounds are added together.14 The roaster with the best total across both categories takes the title — “Nordic Roaster 2019” — and a trophy they keep until the next competition is held.1
That is a big, noisy jury by design. The 2016 edition was cupped by “the 50+ attendees”;4 the 2011 edition, run inside the Nordic Barista Cup, was judged by all 170 attendees voting on ballot slips.3 A cupping panel of five experts and a room of 170 coffee people are measuring different things — the first measures technical quality, the second measures what the trade actually likes.
The format has also moved around. In 2016 the two required coffees were prescribed by origin and processing rather than by cultivar group: “One of the coffees had to be a washed coffee of a Bourbon cultivar, selection or mutation, produced in Central America. The second coffee had to be produced in Colombia and had to be washed” — and that year the scores used the Cup of Excellence system, again 0–100, over two rounds.4 In 2018 the two rounds were a Pacamara coffee and a compulsory coffee.4 In 2011 the split was simply espresso and filter.3
Results
Only some editions could be confirmed here. The official results archive publishes several years as score-sheet images, which are not machine-readable, so 2017 and 2018 are listed on the site without a name this note can quote.4
| Year | Where | Winner | Recorded detail | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2010 | Nordic Barista Cup | Tim Wendelboe (Norway) | Coffee #4, 41 votes; 2nd Da Matteo (24), 3rd Solberg & Hansen (21), 4th Gourmet Coffee (13), 5th Has Bean, 6th Viva Cafe5 |
| 2 | 2011 | Copenhagen | Solberg & Hansen (Norway) | 57 votes overall; 2nd Tim Wendelboe (56), 3rd Kaffa (42). Filter category: Solberg & Hansen (44). Espresso category: Doubleshot, Czech Republic (32). Ten roasters, 170 judging attendees3 |
| 3 | 2016 | Copenhagen, 27–29 Oct | Tim Wendelboe (Norway) | 9 Nordic roasters; two prescribed washed coffees; blind, two rounds, 50+ attendees4 |
| 4 | 2018 | — | not readable | Round 1 a Pacamara, round 2 the compulsory coffee; results published as images4 |
| 5 | 2019 | Oslo, 3–5 Oct | Tim Wendelboe (Norway) | Won overall and both categories12 |
The 2011 result is the one to look at twice. Solberg & Hansen and Tim Wendelboe finished one vote apart — 57 to 56 — across 170 ballots.3 A one-vote margin is inside the noise of any tasting, which is the honest cost of a jury this size.
To verify
Who won the other years, and whether Tim Wendelboe really won seven times. A trade profile credits Wendelboe with Nordic Roaster titles in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018;6 the same claim is already flagged at Tim Wendelboe. Three of those years can now be checked: 2010 is confirmed by a contemporaneous trade report,5 2016 by the organisers’ own results page,4 and 2019 — not in the trade profile’s list at all — by the organisers’ rules and event pages.12 The rest are not confirmed here, because the official archive publishes 2017 and 2018 as images.4 Nothing consulted gives a complete year-by-year winners list, a first edition, or results before 2010.
To verify
Whether it was always a Nordics-only contest. The 2019 rules restrict entry to roasters “located within the Nordic countries.”1 But the 2011 field of ten included roasters from Russia, Korea, Brazil and the Czech Republic, and a Czech roastery — Doubleshot — won the espresso category outright.3 Either the eligibility rule was introduced later or the early editions ran open; no source consulted states which, and the two pages are eight years apart.
To verify
Whether it still runs. The organisers’ own homepage records that “Nordic Roaster Forum Oslo 2020 is cancelled” because of COVID-19, with the line “Hopefully we will be able to put up an event in 2021.”2 Nothing consulted here confirms an edition after 2019, or that the competition resumed. Treat 2019 as the last verified running, not as the last one ever held.
To verify
The name collides with unrelated Danish companies. Research behind this note surfaced two Copenhagen businesses whose names read like this competition: Nordic Roasting Co., a specialty roastery, and Nordic Roast ApS, a company selling instant chai-latte drinks founded in 2018. Both were sourced only to business-directory listings and a retailer page — no primary company filing was checked — and neither is documented anywhere as a Nordic Roaster competitor. They are noted here only so a reader searching the name does not conflate them with the competition.
Why it matters
Two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is that it isolates roasting. Give ten roasteries the same 30 kg of green coffee and the result is a controlled experiment: whatever separates the cups is the roast, not the buying. Most of the specialty industry’s prestige flows from green — the farm on the label, the auction lot, the score. See Green coffee buying and Premiumisation for how much of a coffee’s story is decided before the roaster ever touches it. A same-green competition is one of the few settings where roasting is the whole argument.
The second is regional. The competition sits at the centre of the light-roasting culture that Oslo and Copenhagen exported to the rest of specialty coffee — the style The Barn took to Berlin and La Cabra took worldwide, and the buying side of which is represented in this wiki by Nordic Approach. When a room of Nordic roasters votes on the same coffee, the winner is a fair description of what that scene currently thinks a good roast tastes like. The repeat winner being Tim Wendelboe tells you the scene has been unusually settled on the answer.
Related
- World Coffee Roasting Championship — the sanctioned world roasting title, judged by a certified panel rather than the audience
- World Coffee Championships — the championship family this event deliberately sits outside
- Tim Wendelboe · Solberg & Hansen · Kaffa · Da Matteo · Doubleshot · Has Bean — roasteries recorded in the results above
- Nordic Approach · La Cabra · The Barn — the Nordic light-roast world this competition belongs to
- Coffee roasting · Sample roasting · Agtron scale — what is actually being judged
- Cupping · SCA cupping protocol · Coffee scoring · Cup of Excellence — the tasting and scoring machinery it borrows
- Coffee leaf rust · F1 hybrid · Catimor · Sarchimor · Pacamara · Bourbon — the varieties its categories have called for
- Coffee trade shows · Third wave coffee — the kind of event it is, and the movement around it
Official links
Footnotes
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Nordic Roaster Forum — The Competition (rules) — the organisers’ own rules page; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the eligibility wording, the ten-roaster cap, the €780 fee, both 2019 categories and their quantities, the blind cup-tasting method, the SCA 0–100 scoring, the trophy, and the 2019 Oslo dates and winner ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12
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Nordic Roaster Forum — homepage — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2019 Oslo dates, the 2019 overall and both-category win, and the cancellation of the 2020 Oslo forum ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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Nordic Barista Cup — Nordic Roaster Competition 2011: The Winner — the event organisers’ own site; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2011 placings and vote counts, the espresso and filter categories, the 170 judging attendees and the nationalities of the ten-roaster field ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
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Nordic Roaster Forum — Results archive — the organisers’ own results category; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2016 winner, venue, dates, nine-roaster field, prescribed coffees, 50+ attendee jury and Cup of Excellence scoring, the averaging method, and the 2018 Pacamara/compulsory rounds. 2017 and 2018 placings are published as images and could not be read ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9
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Barista Magazine — The Winners of the Nordic Roaster & NBC — trade magazine report; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2010 placings, vote counts and tasting notes. The article is the only source consulted for that year’s date ↩ ↩2
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Kofio — About Us, Tim Wendelboe — retailer listing repeating the roastery’s award history; seen here only as a search-result snippet, and cited solely for the claimed run of titles flagged above ↩