Swiss Barista Championship
The Swiss Barista Championship is Switzerland’s national championship for baristas — the people who pull espresso for a living — and the country’s single qualifying route into the World Barista Championship. Win it, and you get Switzerland’s one seat at the world round. Come second, and you wait a year.
It is run by SCA Schweiz, the Swiss chapter of the Specialty Coffee Association, whose stated purpose is “creation and promotion of excellence in the coffee industry through innovation, research, education, and communication.”1 The championship sits inside the same bottom-up structure as every other national title: national bodies run their own competitions, the winners go to the world stage, and the World Coffee Championships tally them all up.
For a small country it has produced an outsized amount of this wiki. Emi Fukahori and Mathieu Theis — the two founders of the Zürich roastery MAME — between them hold most of the recent titles, and both converted a Swiss win into a world final.
The year is ahead of the calendar
The first confusing thing about this competition is its dates. The 2026 championship was decided in November 2025.23
That is deliberate, not an error. The season is named for the World Barista Championship edition it feeds. Switzerland picks its 2026 representative in late 2025 so that person has most of a year to prepare for the world round — which in 2026 is in Panama City, alongside World of Coffee Panama. So a “2026 Swiss champion” is someone who competed in autumn 2025.
To verify
Nobody official states the naming rule. The season-ahead reading above is inferred from two SCA Schweiz pages that plainly show a 2026 championship being contested on 19–21 September and 22–23 November 2025,23 plus the same offset showing up in other records: this wiki’s World Barista Championship archive has Emi Fukahori placing 4th in Milan in 2021, while the German Wikipedia list credits her with the 2021 Swiss title, and MAME’s own site calls it her 2020 win. No SCA Schweiz page explains the convention in words. Treat any single year in this note as approximate by one, unless it comes from the official rankings.
How it works
Fifteen minutes on stage, twelve drinks, one competitor at a time:
- Four espressos
- Four cappuccinos
- Four signature drinks — the competitor’s own invention
The panel is four sensory judges, two technical judges, and one head judge, scoring on taste, appearance, technique and overall impression.4 That is the World Barista Championship format almost exactly — the point of a national round is to be a rehearsal for the world one, so the rules track upward.
One note on the drinks: the milk course is a cappuccino here rather than the world round’s open “milk beverage,” and the pattern in the foam is not what is being scored. Latte art has its own separate Swiss title, which Mathieu Theis placed third in back in 2015.
Getting in: pre-rounds, semi-final, final
The 2026 edition ran on a three-stage funnel, and SCA Schweiz published the whole shape of it in advance:
| Stage | When | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-round 1 | Friday 19 September 2025 | Rorschach, at KIALOA |
| Pre-round 2 | Saturday 20 September 2025 | Zürich, at STOLL KAFFEE |
| Pre-round 3 | Sunday 21 September 2025 | Geneva, at Royal Karoma |
| Semi-final and final | 22–23 November 2025 | Swiss Coffee Festival |
Nine baristas advance from the pre-rounds. The winner at each of the three locations qualifies automatically; the remaining six places go on overall ranking across all three venues. Entry costs CHF 30, deducted from the semi-final fee if you get through.3
Two things are worth noticing there. The pre-rounds are deliberately spread across the German-, and French-speaking parts of the country — Rorschach and Zürich in the east, Geneva in the west — and they are held in cafés and roasteries, not a trade-show hall. The championship only moves onto a festival stage once the field is down to nine.
2026: Mathieu Theis, four rounds, four wins
Mathieu Theis won the Swiss Barista Championship 2026, topping the qualifying round, the semi-final and the final — the same name at number one in all three tables.2
Final round
| Place | Competitor | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Mathieu Theis | 683.5 |
| 2 | 2 | Emil Dosev | 609.5 |
| 3 | 3 | Pablo Garcia | 506.5 |
| 4 | 4 | Alexis de Planta | 504.0 |
Semi-final
| Place | Competitor | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Mathieu Theis | 700.5 |
| 2 | 2 | Emil Dosev | 605.5 |
| 3 | 3 | Pablo Garcia | 564.5 |
| 4 | 4 | Alexis de Planta | 512.0 |
| 5 | 5 | Roberto Bertinetti | 511.0 |
| 6 | 6 | Dean Nieth | 426.0 |
| 7 | — | Roger Reber | DQ overtime |
Qualifying round (compulsory)
| Place | Competitor | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Mathieu Theis | 297.5 |
| 2 | 2 | Emil Dosev | 286.5 |
| 3 | 3 | Pablo Garcia | 266.5 |
| 4 | 4 | Alexis de Planta | 230.0 |
| 5 | 5 | Dean Nieth | 187.5 |
| 6 | 6 | Roberto Bertinetti | 185.0 |
| 7 | 7 | Roger Reber | 157.0 |
| 8 | — | Hossein | withdrawal (58.5) |
| 9 | — | Jerry More | DQ overtime |
All three tables come straight from the SCA Schweiz rankings page, which publishes every round rather than just the podium.2 That is more transparency than the world body currently offers — see the World Barista Championship note for how hard official world scores are to find.
Two details in those tables deserve plain English. “DQ overtime” means disqualified for running past the fifteen-minute limit — the clock is absolute, and three competitors across the 2026 rounds lost their result to it. “Withdrawal” means the competitor pulled out; the 58.5 next to Hossein is a partial score from a routine that did not finish.
The other thing the numbers show: the gap between first and second widened as the rounds went on, from 11 points in qualifying to 74 points in the final. Theis did not squeak through.
Champions
| Year | Champion | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2026 | Mathieu Theis |
| 2 | 2025 | Christos Sotiros |
| 3 | 2024 | Mathieu Theis |
| 4 | 2023 | Christos Sotiros |
| 5 | 2022 | Christos Sotiros |
| 6 | 2021 | Emi Fukahori |
| 7 | 2020 | Emi Fukahori |
| 8 | 2019 | Mathieu Theis |
| 9 | 2018 | Mathieu Theis |
| 10 | 2017 | André Eiermann |
| 11 | 2016 | Mathieu Theis |
| 12 | 2015 | Emi Fukahori |
| 13 | 2014 | Nina Rimpl |
| 14 | 2013 | Shem Leupin |
| 15 | 2012 | Philipp Schallberger |
| 16 | 2011 | Michel Jüngling |
| 17 | 2010 | Mathias Bühler |
| 18 | 2009 | Philipp Schallberger |
| 19 | 2008 | Thomas Liebe |
| 20 | 2007 | Anna Käppeli |
| 21 | 2006 | Giovanni Meola |
| 22 | 2005 | Kurt Bauer |
| 23 | 2004 | Quintino Sergi |
| 24 | 2003 | Quintino Sergi |
| 25 | 2002 | Ottavia Ciarmoli |
| 26 | 2001 | Giovanni Meola |
| 27 | 2000 | Giovanni Meola |
The list runs back to 2000, the same year the World Barista Championship itself began in Monte Carlo, which suggests the Swiss title was created as a feeder from the start rather than bolted on later.4 Ottavia Ciarmoli in 2002 is recorded as the first woman to win it — sixteen years before a woman won the world title.
Two independent checks land on this list. Anna Käppeli, the 2007 Swiss champion above, appears in this wiki’s World Barista Championship results archive as Switzerland’s competitor placing 5th at the 2007 world round in Tokyo — the national title converting into a world seat exactly as described. And 2017 belonging to André Eiermann matches Mathieu Theis’s own record of placing second that year.
To verify
The historic winner list has one source, and it disagrees with MAME about Mathieu Theis. Every row above 2026 comes from a German-language Wikipedia article,4 which cites archived Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (Switzerland) pages and Swiss news outlets but which nobody has independently confirmed here. SCA Schweiz publishes no browsable historical archive; only the current season’s rankings are online. The concrete conflict: this list credits Mathieu Theis with 2016, 2018, 2019, 2024 and 2026 — five titles, while MAME’s own site says four, and his note here follows MAME. Given the season-offset problem above, “2024” and “2019” may be the same win counted under two conventions, or they may be five genuine titles. His name is also spelled Theiss on Wikipedia and Theis on the official rankings and MAME’s site; Theis is correct.
To verify
Who won 2025. The German Wikipedia list gives Christos Sotiros for 2022, 2023 and 2025 — three titles, which would make him the second-most decorated competitor here — but no official SCA Schweiz page confirming any of them was reachable. The only other trace found was a Swiss Coffee Festival 2024 video whose description names a “Christ Sido” as “your 2025 barista champion of Switzerland”;5 that video was not viewed here, and the name is almost certainly the same person mangled. Suggestive, not authoritative. Do not build a note on Sotiros from this alone.
To verify
What anybody actually served. No source consulted names a farm, variety, altitude, processing method, roaster, cupping score or price for any coffee used in any Swiss Barista Championship routine, and the rankings pages carry competitor names only — no company column.2 So Emil Dosev, Pablo Garcia, Alexis de Planta and the rest are, on the public record, names without employers. Competitors’ coffees live in event technical sheets that are not published. Do not attach a café, a roastery or a lot to any competitor here without a primary source.
Why it matters
National championships are where the coffee industry’s promotion system starts, and Switzerland is a compact demonstration of the whole thing working.
Two people won this title, went to the world round, and built a company on it. Emi Fukahori took her Swiss run to the World Brewers Cup and won it outright in 2018 with a Laurina lot from Daterra; Mathieu Theis placed 3rd at the 2018 World Barista Championship in Amsterdam. Their roastery MAME now sells “competition coffees” as a retail category — see Premiumisation for why anyone pays for that.
The same funnel runs in every SCA-affiliated country, which is what makes the world championship a genuinely global tournament rather than an invitational. It also explains a quiet inequality: winning a title in a country with three pre-rounds and a nine-person semi-final is a different achievement from winning one in a country with sixty entrants, and the world round treats both as one seat.
SCA Schweiz runs the other national titles alongside this one — Brewers Cup, Cup Tasters, Coffee in Good Spirits, Latte Art and Roasting — with all six sets of 2026 rankings published on the same page,2 mirroring the six World Coffee Championships they feed.
Related
- World Barista Championship — the world round this title is the entry ticket to
- World Coffee Championships — the full circuit of world titles, and the national funnels behind each
- Mathieu Theis — the most decorated competitor in this championship’s recent history
- Emi Fukahori — Swiss champion turned World Brewers Cup world champion
- MAME — the Zürich roastery both of them founded
- Specialty Coffee Association · World Coffee Events — the international bodies above SCA Schweiz
- Barista — the profession being judged
- World Brewers Cup · World Latte Art Championship · World Cup Tasters Championship — the sibling titles with their own Swiss national rounds
- Coffee scoring · Cupping — how judging scales work, and why scores do not compare across years
- Premiumisation — what a title does to the price of the coffee behind it
Official links
- Official site — SCA Schweiz (Speciality Coffee Association Schweiz)
- Official — SCA Schweiz championships
- Official — Swiss Coffee Championships 2026 rankings, every round
Footnotes
-
SCA Schweiz — homepage (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; organisation name, mission statement and championships section ↩
-
SCA Schweiz — Swiss Coffee Championships 2026: Die genauen Rankings (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; all final, semi-final and qualifying scores above ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
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SCA Schweiz — Swiss Barista Championship 2026: Pre-Rounds Are Here! (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; pre-round dates, venues, the nine-barista cut and the CHF 30 fee ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Wikipedia (German) — Schweizer Barista Championship — confirmed via WebFetch; the format description and the full 2000–2026 champions list ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Swiss Coffee Festival 2024 — Sonntag, 13. Oktober 2024 (video) — surfaced in research as naming a 2025 Swiss champion; the video itself was not viewed here ↩